He began working as a young boy, initially as a paper-boy and messenger, then later as an assistant in his mother's grocery store and as a farm labourer at Windsor.

Ley learned shorthand while living in Windsor and at the age of fourteen secured a position as a junior clerk and stenographer with a solicitor on Pitt Street.

Despite this, he was appointed as New South Wales Minister for Justice from 1922 to 1925 – in the cabinet of Premier Sir George Fuller – and gained a reputation for harsh decisions.

[1] Shortly after he became Minister for Justice, Ley made an official visit to Western Australia and was introduced to Maggie Evelyn Brook, a magistrate's wife.

He unsuccessfully tried to bribe his Labor opponent, Frederick McDonald, with a £2,000 share in a property at Kings Cross in return for withdrawing from the ballot.

Conventional wisdom would have suggested that Ley, as a former senior member of the New South Wales government, would have been considered for a post in the federal cabinet.

However, Ley's fellow conservatives, including Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, began to have doubts about him after the election.

In 1928, state legislator Hyman Goldstein, another of Ley's public critics, was found dead after apparently falling from "Suicide Point" on the cliffs of Coogee.

About all that can be said for certain is that he used his move to England to start afresh in dubious business ventures, and during the Second World War he was arrested and convicted for black marketeering.

The case became known as the "Chalk-pit Murder" because Mudie's body was dumped in a chalk pit on Woldingham Common in Surrey, thirty miles away from Ley's home.