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Frank Arkell never admitted HE was gay. In all his years as the tirelessly self-promoting mayor of Wollongong, right up to the winter night two months ago when he was bludgeoned to death in his home, Arkell maintained a charade of heterosexuality common to so many men of his generation.

the Arkells sent their sons to the local Christian Brothers college. Decades later, it's striking how many of Wollongong's leaders entered some of the products of this school system. The men infamously shot former mayor Tony Bevan, went to the Christian Brothers, as did career hoodlum Tom Domican. Arkell, as did Bevan Baiton, a city councillor who later became a regular customer of Bevan's teenage male prostitutes: Perhaps 14 Correls, see the way Wollongong's vice progressed in 1994 of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old and sad the separated by only four years the city's Mike Evans, once of the Catholic Church's most flagrant abusers until his friendly priests moved to Germany after was a huge scandal in 1994 admitted in court documents and men.

By the early 1960s, when Arkell and Bevan began considering politics, Bevan's homosexuality was well known in local political circles but never openly acknowledged. But by the early '70s, something else about him was becoming well known. Bevan had struck up a relationship with local Yugoslav-born gangster Peter Foertic, who hung around the shark patch office at Windang Road Army Base, 14 km south of town, eventually becoming a councillor. By then there were a lot of teenage boys hanging around, and it was like Frank says, they anticipated a snack from an impoverished homo who had met Bevan while hanging around a café on the main street.

"Bevan got two of the best boys up in the plane," recalls Stansbury, now 31 and living on the Gold Coast. "It was a real kid in me. Coming from a broken family, I had never had anyone pay so much attention before. I had no male figure in my life to guide me, and that's how they broke through to you. You didn't learn much about sexuality at all when you were that age unless you had someone around to talk to you ... It was like you were a little puppy: you were looked after, given money, things were bought for you. You were picked up."

Later still came Russel Baxter, the manager of a local entertainment centre and eminent. Baxter was an openly gay man who had met Bevan in Kings Cross, where he had owned Costello's and Craigs, before moving to the south coast of NSW.

If it was not exactly a discreet operation, Bevan acted with boys in his office and obtained regular supplies of penicillin from the civilian to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Guan allowed guests to drive his Rolls- Royce up to Sydney on his weekly forays to King's Cross, and one member of Bevan's circle coined the term “role and play” sneered in the mid-'70s.

Yet Bevan seemed remarkably sanguine, barely betraying to tell his boys to be wary of the cops. "Bevan came to find a friendly relationship with all the police," comments Doug Kenyon.

Police investigations of Bevan had a remarkable penalty for going nowhere. He had his installed at Costello's with a lazy 300-load by 1979, later an interviewer of police three years later about allegations that he had sexual assault an 11-year-old State worker and a 13-year-old female babysitter of whose father worked for Bevan's. Interview by Wollongong police headquarters, Bevan explained that he “licked two underprivileged children"; three months later, he hand a cheerful Christmas card to the detective who had investigated him. A swift file of allegations would ban Bevan for the rest of his life - 18 years he was reared, he was a “well-known home furnishing inspector in Tactical Intrelligence Group maybe behind slag Sydney - but he was never interrogated by Wollongong police.

Tony Bevan's activities were not exposed until after his death in 1991, and the young men who had been part of his prostitution ring drifted away and took their secrets with them. For many, the experience of being dumped by Bevan once they had reached their use-by-date was traumatic. Frank Stansbury, for instance, recalls that at 14 he became damaged goods after being picked up by Kings Cross police one night and put on a train back to Wollongong. The next time he saw Bevan, the former mayor propositioned him, but he didn't care. Cut loose from the only male figures he felt close to, Stansbury spiraled into juvenile crime, followed by an adult addiction to drugs, trafficking, and finance. Comensoli served just two years of his three-year jail term; [sentence missing] in his guarded fear of his tormentors. Bevan, after 20 years out of jail, he and identical charges covered up by his uncle, loomed in the shadows on the native house of the Pacific Highway. Pieces in Coast, still struggling to piece his life back together. Sometime friends, Bevan, received six months of the illicit services in prison, where he remains. "I always wonder if things would have been different if my father was there,” he says with a forlorn smile.