Perhaps his relatively recent surfacing in the current stream of true-crime television specials is because even four years after his death, certain people still aren't talking about the man who ruled Kings Cross from the 1950s.
''Police officers in particular wouldn't talk because they feel the story is still alive,'' says the writer and director of Mr Sin, Hugh Piper. ''I really tried with the NSW police force and I can't help but feel I was fobbed off.''
Drawing on the perspectives of Saffron's son, Alan, former attorney-general Frank Walker and journalists and writers who followed the rumours and royal commissions throughout the decades, the film presents a detailed investigation of the dealings of the notorious gangster, to which nothing more than tax evasion (for which he served 17 months from 1987) ever stuck. Using archival footage and photographs, with minimal re-enactments (one is from a Mike Willesee special in the 1970s, in which Saffron associate Jimmy Anderson plays himself being attacked in a nightclub brawl), the film is ''full of revelations'', Piper says.
''We've put Abe into this social, historical context in a way that hasn't been done before. It's as much an insight into the history of Sydney as it is into Abe and into how the police did their work. Underbelly tells us a lot of that stuff but this was before Underbelly. It was about setting up all those models of behaviour that in the long run bore fruit for the people who came after.''
Like many Australians, Piper grew up with the legend of Saffron, the son of Polish migrants who brought nightclubs and strip clubs and then world-class acts such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to Sydney. Melbourne's Truth newspaper ran stories on the scandals of ''Sin City'', which invariably involved Saffron. When Piper moved to Kings Cross in the 1980s, he would catch sight of the ''enigmatic'' Saffron, gold chain glinting through ''a very hairy, broad chest'', and visited his playground, the Venus Room strip joint.
''At two or three in the morning there would be the most extraordinary cross-section of people and naked women walking around,'' Piper says. ''It was a watering hole. The pubs in those days closed at midnight or even earlier and all sorts of people would go to the Venus Room afterwards.''
It was likely the setting of many a deal struck between Saffron and his cohorts, who allegedly ranged from detectives to politicians, union bosses and developers. It was also a hot-spot for wooing women. In the film, Saffron's daughter, from one of his many extra-marital affairs, remembers a devoted father.
His son, Alan, whose book about his father is called Gentle Satan, speaks of the torment suffered by his mother, nightclub dancer Doreen. What isn't included in the film is Alan's claim that Abe had him committed to the infamous Chelmsford psychiatric hospital after convincing police to drop drug charges against his son.
''Alan used to get lots of girls because he was Abe's son and then Abe would turn up at a club with a woman and the doorman would say, 'Your son's down there having a high old time,' and so, in a sense, Alan started cramping his style. Then all of a sudden Alan was busted for drugs and Abe said, 'I'm going to get you sorted out, son.' He was in Chelmsford for a while and he had a lot of electro-convulsive therapy, which I think has had a huge impact on him,'' Piper says. ''There were some incredible stories we couldn't include due to time constraints.''
Bitter though Alan may be at this and the snub he received from Abe's will, he maintains his father was not a violent man but concedes Abe may have ''condoned violence'' by his heavies. The two nastiest crimes linked to Saffron - the murder of anti-development protester Juanita Nielsen and the Luna Park ghost train fire of 1979 - remain unsolved.
''This film isn't glamorising Abe Saffron,'' Piper says. ''It's telling a story that he did create a very glamorous world, particularly in the early years, but by the time he got to the '70s and '80s he'd become more interested in the big end of the town and become a wheeler-dealer rather than trying to create an ambience in the city.
''But still, there are a lot of people with an affection for him and what he represents,'' he says. To put it in a historical context, going back to the Rum Corps, the colony's always been like that and maybe we've always had people like Abe. But I don't want to suggest that Abe is in any way a Ned Kelly figure. Abe was more like an Old Testament emperor: into sex and power.''
Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Story screens on Thursday 24th June 2010 at 9.25pm on ABC1
