Enforcer Read Free Page A

Ranges, near where we were living. They’d started back in 1941 as the first outlaw club in Australia. They weren’t a big club, but that’s how they liked it, small and real tight.
    They were mad as cut snakes. They were always in blues and caused themselves a lot of trouble with the local coppers. They used to do things that I wouldn’t do. They’d switch off their headlights at ten o’clock at night and scream down these roads through Sherbrooke Forest. I thought, Fuck this. If a truck came round a corner you were gone.
    We used to go for runs together or meet up at milk bars and play pool, put songs on the jukebox. I was just about to become a nominee for them when my old man decided the family was moving back to New South Wales. I could have stayed in Victoria, but Dad was getting pretty crook with diabetes and a bad heart, so I’d been helping him out a lot and we’d become real close.
    We ended up back on Sydney’s northern beaches, at Avalon and then Dee Why, then shifted to Dulwich Hill and Surry Hills in the inner city. While we were living in Surry Hills, Mum went into the Women’s Hospital to have her last babies, the twins, Cathy and Pauline. It was 1965 and I had just got my first tattoo. It was a panther on my arm, but Dad absolutely hated tattoos, so I had to keep my shirt sleeves rolled right down to hide it from him. I went to visit Mum in the hospital and for some unknown reason, sitting there opposite Dad, I started rolling up my sleeves.
    Dad sharpened his focus. ‘What the shit is that?’
    Whoomp , I was off, hotfooting it out of the hospital with the old man after me. I was nineteen and Dad was crook, but I wasn’t taking him on. He was still the toughest bloke I’d ever run into.
    No matter how sick Dad got, he was still a mad bluer and wasn’t going to take crap from anyone. If someone insulted him or put the family down, he didn’t care how bad his heart was, he’d want to punch on or get even. He came home from a pub at Taylor Square one day in a pretty bad way, spewing and not real well. I got it out of him that this bloke and four of his mates had ganged up on him. I knew who the bloke was, and knew that he walked past the same factory in Surry Hills every afternoon. We went down there and I hid in the doorway while my old man waited out the front of the factory. This bloke eventually turned up with a mate of his and obviously thought they were going to do the old man over again. Well I grabbed them and dragged them inside the entrance alcove and gave them a good hiding. Then I said to the old man, ‘All right, Dad, do what you wanna do.’ The old man could hardly make it up the steps, but he got up and gave them a kicking.
    Another time we were driving together when he spotted a bloke who’d pissed him off. The old man pulled over and I grabbed the bloke and had him in the back. The old man was saying, ‘Punch him in the ear, belt him there, twist this, break that.’ I ended up breaking both his thumbs, a couple of fingers on each hand, and thumping the shit out of him. Then we threw him out of the car at about thirty miles an hour. He bounced down the road.
     
    M EANWHILE I was doing a bit of work driving utes and vans, doing deliveries. But my old man had a lot of friends up at Kings Cross and I started picking up some work from them. I think he got to know them through his trucking business; he did a lot of carting interstate. Some of them were on the shady side, but to Dad, that was their business. Dad never got charged with a crime, he never went to jail. He got on as well with some of the top cops as he did with the blokes at the Cross. It was funny, one night we’d have the regional police commander over for tea and the next it would be a well-known underworld identity. I think Dad was respected because he had the balls to say no to a lot of stuff that people wanted him to do. And he would never tell the coppers a thing about the people he knew up the Cross. He had