Enforcer Read Free

moved around a bit. We went to Toukley, Ettalong and Umina on the New South Wales central coast, then to North Narrabeen, Narrabeen and Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches. I was fifteen when I got work on a fishing boat, then as an offsider to a milko, but the jobs never lasted long because we were always moving. I don’t know why we shifted around so much. Dad never told us. But we never stayed anywhere more than a few months. Next thing we kids knew we’d be packing up all the bunk beds and moving again.
    We ended up down in Victoria, at a big guesthouse on ten acres called Sassafras Lodge. It had six bungalows out the back, and ten or twelve bedrooms in the main house. Seeing as my old man wasn’t using it as a guesthouse, I took one of the guest rooms down the far end of the house.
    Even though I was seventeen by this stage, my old man used to insist I be home by eleven pm. That was his rule. So I’d dutifully return by eleven, but then I’d go down to my room, where I had this German shepherd called Zig. He was the biggest shepherd you’ve ever seen and he was trained so that if anyone came near me he’d rip them to pieces. I would put Zig on watch, and the old man knew he couldn’t come into the room or the dog would get him. Hence he didn’t check on me. I’d go out the window and back down to my mate’s. We’d drive around in someone’s car or get the bikes and go for a ride.
    One night we were driving through Box Hill in my mate Johnny Nankervis’s FJ when we were attacked by about eight cars. Johnny did a U-ey and headed for home, but four cars kept up the chase and ran us off the road. As soon as the FJ went into the bank on the side of the road, Johnny and my other mates all hit the toe and I was left there to punch on by myself. I grabbed this great hunk of wood that was lying on the side of the road and laid into everyone that came near me.
    After a while they chucked it in and pissed off in their cars. I had to hitch home, which meant I didn’t get back until about two in the morning. I was sneaking in the back door when the old man piped up, ‘Is that you?’
    ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a good reason.’
    I had my hand just inside the doorjamb, and he booted the door, crushing my hand. My hand was killing me but I went inside and told him what had happened.
    ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘Go to bed and I’ll talk to you when you get up.’
    Next day he bandaged my hand and asked, ‘Would you know any of these blokes if you saw ’em?’
    ‘I’d know two of the cars.’
    So that night we went down to Box Hill – Dad with a pick handle – and I spotted the two cars parked outside a milk bar. Dad walked into the milk bar, smashed every bloke in the place, then came out and smashed their headlights and windscreens before hopping back in the car.
    ‘When you grow up,’ he said, ‘that’s how you do it.’
    ‘Yeah, okay Dad.’
     
    A FTER YEARS of boxing, in Victoria I moved into the wrestling scene. I found that the wrestling could outdo the boxing because, when you’re a boxer, you really just learn to throw punches, but if you’re a wrestler, you can grab a person, get him in close, and put arm locks on him, leg locks, head locks. You can immobilise a person in so many ways. And when you combine the boxing skills with the wrestling, it sets you up to be a very strong fighter.
    At seventeen, I won the Victorian under-twenty-one Greco-Roman championship, but I came away with a more lasting legacy, too. I met an old Italian bloke who’d been a champion wrestler in Europe, and he said to me, ‘The way you wrestle, you wrestle like gladiator. You like little Caesar.’ After that people started calling me Little Caesar, and before long they dropped the ‘little’. From then on I was known as Caesar.
    I bought myself an AJS 500 twin bike, had my hair styled in an Elvis peak, and started hanging round a motorcycle club called Bad Blood from Emerald at the bottom of the Dandenong