Arthur King still seems agitated when talking about the time he disappeared for two days.

Maybe, after all these years, he's just sick of talking about it.

For a few nights in August, 1973, Arthur vanished, and his neighbours feared the worst.

There had been violence brewing on their street over two things that drive Sydney: money and land.

Arthur had organised a group of about 50 neighbours to oppose a developer's plans to knock down their homes on Victoria Street in Kings Cross.

The fight to save their street was costing some powerful and dangerous people a lot of money. It would ultimately be linked with the suspected murder of Arthur's neighbour, high-profile journalist Juanita Nielsen.

Some of Arthur's neighbours entered his apartment and found him missing, the bedroom in disarray and a desk chair thrown on the bed.

A few days later, Arthur returned, shoeless and shaken up, and hurriedly packed his belongings.

His absence had caused a stir, and some of the neighbours gathered asked Arthur where he'd been.

"I said, ‘I'm not saying anything. I'll see you all later,'" Arthur recalled decades later.

Arthur left that day and never returned to live in Kings Cross.

What happened to Arthur in those few days is a story he chose not to tell anyone for a long time.

Now, he's shared it with the ABC's Unravel: Juanita podcast, where Juanita Nielsen's family search for answers into her unsolved disappearance.

Following his abduction, the street Arthur and Juanita fought for was rocked by a siege, a murder, and a suspicious death in an unexplained house fire.

And it's a period that still leaves its mark on Sydney all these decades later.

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Duration: 50 minutes 34 seconds50m

Victoria Street

Arthur King had lived in the Cross for three years before his kidnapping.

Victoria Street was right in the heart of all the neighbourhood had to offer at the time: artists' residences, nightclubs, and illegal gambling dens.

"It was the liveliest part of Sydney by any stretch of the imagination," former resident and artist Ian Milliss told the Unravel: Juanita podcast.

"It was still the residual bohemian place that it had been from the 30s and 40s onwards, and it had an extraordinary social mix.

"For Australia at that time, [it] was about as exotic as it got."

Some of the country's most notorious criminals ran the place. Drugs, sex and bribery fuelled it all.

It was gritty and dangerous, but also beautiful. Around the main strip, leafy streets were lined with historic terrace houses — home to artists, migrants, the elderly, students, wharfies and seafarers.

Victoria Street had affordable housing and sweeping views of the Sydney skyline: pensioners and single-parent families scored prime views of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Many of the older folk lived under "protected tenancies" that meant, among other things, that their landlords couldn't raise their rent without their consent.

Some had lived on Victoria Street for over 40 years.

But by the 1970s, the Cross was swept up in big changes taking over Sydney. One developer in particular — Frank Theeman — saw the terraces on Victoria Street as a potential goldmine.

A city of boom and bust

Planning reforms in the 60s by NSW Liberal premier Robert Askin gave developers enormous power and stripped the rights of tenants.

Building height limits were removed and developers were incentivised to buy large tracts of land — the bigger the block, the higher they were allowed to build.

Sky-high apartment towers and modernist concrete office buildings began popping up all over the city.

"There's too much money around," Victoria Street resident, Juanita Nielsen, said at the time.

"But these pressures, which exist all over Sydney and probably all over the world today, are coming to a head in Kings Cross."

Theeman spent about $52 million in today's money buying up one side of Victoria Street.

Inspired by what he'd seen in New York, Theeman wanted to knock down the terraces and replace them with three 45-storey apartment towers and a 15-storey office block.

All but 12 of the 400 tenants on one side of the street were evicted in one week.

The remaining residents and their allies, organised by Arthur, were the one thing that stood in the way of Theeman's vision for Victoria Street.

"It was our view that it was one of the best streets in Sydney, and that shouldn't happen here," Arthur says.

Hired goons with sideburns and flares turned up and began to intimidate and threaten the residents.

Meanwhile, Arthur believed he was being harassed by police.

On one occasion, uniformed officers picked him up and held him outside Darlinghurst station without a charge. The next day, two police entered his house without a warrant saying they were looking for drugs that they never found.

"I was scared shitless," Arthur says.

A few nights later, he says he woke in the middle of the night to a heavyset man in a single-breasted suit standing over his bed.

Bound and gagged

What we know about what happened that night comes from Arthur's testimony to Juanita Nielsen's coronial inquest in 1983.

Arthur's front door was locked, so he assumed the man had broken in.

When he chased the intruder out of his apartment he confronted two other men standing in the hallway.

He was hit on the back of the head with a wooden bat, then grabbed and blindfolded — fortunate, in a way, as Arthur felt sure if he saw the men's faces they would have killed him.

With his hands bound and mouth gagged, Arthur was pushed out onto the street barefoot.

Outside, he managed to spit out the gag and scream for help.

"I was trying to attract attention," Arthur says.

He was put face down into the back of a car with the two men sitting beside him.

Through his blindfold he could just make out the passing lights of the city.

After a few hours the men pulled over, put a rope around his neck and made him get in the boot of the car.

Through a hole in the boot Arthur could see other cars stopped behind him just a few feet away, but there was no way to signal for help .

He was being driven down the south coast, but he did not know where.

More muscle arrives on Victoria Street

Before he was abducted, Arthur had arranged a meeting between the Victoria Street residents' group and the NSW Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) — the radical branch of one of the country's most powerful unions.

Australian unions had major industrial muscle at the time. And on Victoria Street, the BLF unveiled a powerful tactic: a "Green Ban" on development.

A green ban was basically a strike: BLF members would refuse to work on the development, and if developers used outside workers, they'd put down their tools at all sites across the city.

The BLF had already supported community groups across Sydney trying to stop the destruction of sites for environmental or heritage reasons.

Amidst the development boom, public debate had turned to whether houses in the inner-city should only be for people who could afford to live there.

The Green Bans were about everyday people involving themselves directly in the planning of cities: about who should decide what comes down and what goes up.

"It's not much good winning a 35-hour week if we're going to choke to death in planless and polluted cities, where rents are too high, where ordinary people can't live," said NSW BLF secretary Jack Mundey at the time.

The Victoria Street ban was a serious threat to Frank Theeman, who was losing a fortune in interest every day the terrace houses remained standing: at one point, it was about $200,000 a week in today's terms.

To hold the Green Ban, the BLF said the terrace houses needed to remain occupied.

As Theeman had evicted the tenants, a group of 30 squatters moved in. They were a politically engaged group of students, residents and young professionals, most under the age of 40. They carried protest signs that said: "Houses for people, not profit".

"It was the first time this had happened in a generation," says Ian Milliss, who joined the squatters from his house at the bottom of Victoria Street.

"To actually fight a developer on the street to stop them doing something, and to take over their property, was really unheard of."

At their next meeting, BLF secretary Jack Mundey stood up and threatened that if anything happened to Arthur, nothing would ever be built on Victoria Street.

Arthur's ordeal

After being driven around for hours, blindfolded, Arthur and his kidnappers arrived at a motel in the dark.

To avoid suspicion from motel staff, Arthur's captors tried to replace the blindfold with two pads and a pair of sunglasses, but the pads kept slipping from his eyes.

"I suggested that this didn't seem to be a very efficient way of doing it, and perhaps if they had some sticky-tape it might work better," Arthur told Juanita Nielsen's coronial inquest in 1983.

"They didn't have any sticky-tape, but they did have a couple of band-aids, so they took the blindfold off. I kept my eyes totally closed the whole time and they put the band-aids over my eyes and then put the sunglasses on."

He was hassled out of the car, and one of the men held something sharp to his throat.

In the motel room, Arthur had his hands and feet bound and was made to sleep on the floor, in a space between the wall and the bed.

He lay there for several days as the two men talked on the phone, watched TV and listened to the radio.

Arthur figured they were from interstate, as they said they had travelled up by train from Melbourne, and he overheard them talking about the Victorian football results.

One showed Arthur a wad of bills amounting to $5000 which he says they'd been paid to get him out of the way for a few days.

On a few occasions a maid came to the door, and Arthur was shoved into the bathroom behind a closed door.

Fearing for both of their lives, Arthur says he made no attempt to get her attention.

"I was concerned for my safety, I wanted to get out of it alive," he told the inquest.

Two and a half days after they first arrived, they drove back to the city.

Through his peephole in the boot, Arthur says he saw the men had parked outside the Venus Room — the Kings Cross club run by Jim Anderson, a right-hand man of notorious crime boss Abe Saffron.

They returned to the car with a message: Arthur was being released, but he must leave his flat in Victoria Street and take no part in the resident action group.

He was given a cover story that he had hitchhiked up the coast for a couple of days and been struck by a migraine.

Arthur later told the inquest the two men warned him that if he went to police with a different story, they would know about it.

"Play it cool, Arthur, next time you might not get a couple of nice guys like us, you could get a couple of 'sadoes' or get someone to line you up in their rifle sights," Arthur recounted them saying.

When he got back to his flat, Arthur quickly packed his things and left to stay with a friend in a suburb away from the Cross.

"I chose not to tell my story to the police because I thought they were certainly at least partly responsible for my abduction," he told the Unravel: Juanita podcast.

The Squatters

After the Green Ban was put in place, things on Victoria Street grew more dangerous by the day.

One of the squatters, Wendy Bacon, says that any unoccupied houses were gutted by Theeman's crew to make them unliveable. What had started as one occupied building soon grew to 10.

The squatters were in a stand-off with Theeman's thugs, who terrorised them, face to face.

Later in the fight for the street, Bacon says someone left an orchid at her door on Valentine's Day which contained a bullet and a message: "Have a good day, but avoid barbershops".

"And that was a reference to [the fact]… I could have my throat slit," she says.

Bacon says unexplained fires became routine on the street, including one that claimed the life of a 23-year-old Aboriginal woman.

Theeman had employed Fred Krahe, an ex-NSW police detective and former head of the hold-up squad whose reputation preceded him as an underworld enforcer.

He's often talked about as one of the most feared men in the Cross at that time — and that's saying something.

Theeman also turned to "Karate Joe" Meissner, a self-proclaimed world karate champion with a Burt Reynolds moustache, who supposedly used 100 people including experts from his karate school to evict the squatters.

All of this went on under the eyes of the local police.

The squatters set up their own patrols, which would pass Theeman's crew in the streets at night.

At the end of 1973, after six months of squatting, there were 100 people occupying the houses, including some former tenants.

Inspired by the Victoria Street action group, similar protests and squats had sprung up against developments across Sydney.

That summer, a protester was found guilty of trespassing in the houses Theeman owned: some squatters left, but 40 or so stayed.

Rumours began to swirl that Theeman's thugs had recruited more men, that there would be more violence, and that police were coming to empty the street.

The squatters set about barricading the houses with timber and corrugated iron from the partially demolished and burnt-out buildings.

Christmas came and went, and the squatters continued to build their barricades.

Then, very early on the morning of January 3rd, 1974, the squatters got word of something big.

The Victoria Street Siege

What unfolded over the next two days became known as the "Victoria Street Siege" and it marked a turning point for the street.

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Hundreds of police and several wagons moved from the station down to Victoria Street and blocked either end of the road.

"[Someone] saw all the police build up around Darlinghurst Police Station getting ready to come and get us," Milliss said.

"It really became very intense. We were working like mad to barricade ourselves in, [and] we were pretty seriously worried about how it might play out, that it could actually be very dangerous."

Then the thugs arrived. As they passed through the police line, officers stood by and watched as they smashed their way in with sledgehammers and axes, and then set about destroying the fittings, plumbing and wiring inside.

"They didn't try to open the door. They just smashed the door to smithereens," Milliss said.

The flats at number 111 were impenetrable, so Theeman's men spent hours knocking a hole through the roof and then through the first floor to reach the squatters in the bottom room.

Hundreds of people poured in from all over Sydney to join the fight. About 50 were arrested. Some gave up peacefully, others were dragged out.

News cameras broadcast the ensuing scenes to the rest of the country of police grabbing at protestors, dragging them along the ground and throwing them into the back of police cars.

One protester took a stand on a rooftop and defied police to get him off the chimney.

A month or so after the siege, most of the squatters, the protesters, and the few residents who had remained were gone.

"There was a green ban on it still, but the fight as such had sort of been lost," Milliss says.

With the protestors and squatters out, journalist Juanita Nielsen became one of the few remaining barriers to the development.

The death of Juanita Nielsen

In April 1975, Frank Theeman had a win. In a shock move, the radical NSW branch of the BLF headed by Jack Mundey was taken over by federal officials, whose first action was to lift the green ban on Victoria Street.

Juanita Nielsen never joined the residents group, but she owned a local newspaper, NOW, which fiercely defended the residents and opposed Theeman's plans for her street.

Juanita had first moved to the area in the 1960s, and loved being able to sit on the front step of her tiny terrace with a cup of tea, chatting with sex workers heading home in the morning, or her neighbours on their way out to work.

"There were always people at every hour of the day and night. You could get a meal 24 hours a day, it was full of coffee shops, places where people would meet. Everybody knew everybody else, which was remarkable in such a large population," Juanita said in an interview in 1974.

Juanita and her newspaper were instrumental in gaining the support of John Glebe, secretary of the water and sewerage employees' union.

With the BLF green ban gone, John and his union imposed their own ban on development, which meant Frank Theem