Enforcer Read Free Page B

his own code, which was loyalty and honour.
    The Cross became my main haunt. It was buzzing from all the American Marines on R&R from Vietnam. There was rock’n’roll at Surf City, illegal casinos, the transvestite stage show Les Girls and the Whiskey Au Go Go Nightclub on William Street. There were characters like the strip-joint spruiker ‘Half a Mo’ who wore funny-coloured suits and a bowler hat; strippers like Alexander the Great who had the biggest tits in the Cross; and the most famous of them all, Sandra Nelson at the Pink Pussycat. I took out Bambi, the second most famous stripper in town. Chequers nightclub was for the posh types. No bikers allowed, but Dad and I were allowed in.
    Behind it all were the standover men like Chow Hayes and Chicka Reeves. And then there were the big players above them.
    I was coming out of the dark backrooms of the Carousel Club on business one time when I bumped into a very well-known underworld boss surrounded by bodyguards. He turned to me and said, ‘You’re Caesar.’
    ‘Yeah. And I know who you are.’
    ‘If you’re ever looking for a bit of work, get in contact with me through the club here.’
    He was known as the Little King, and from then on I worked for him – collecting and doing other bits and pieces. The going rate for most collectors was ten per cent, but I used to charge thirty-five per cent, so I’d get the real hard jobs, retrieving money from people who’d purchased goods and hadn’t paid for them. Not straights, these were people on the other side of the law. I wouldn’t go near a straight.
     
    W E UPPED and moved again, this time to Annandale in Sydney’s inner west. It was pretty rough around there in 1966. There was a local bowling alley that was known as Blood Alley because if you were there on a Friday or Saturday night you’d have three or four groups of blokes punching on. They didn’t give a stuff that there were families there with kids.
    We had one gang up the street that considered themselves to be real heavies. Sometimes there’d be twenty or thirty of them hanging round of a weekend. I was at home one day when someone came in and said one of these blokes had pulled a gun on my younger brother. I was straight out the door, running as fast as I could, but who was already halfway up the street in front of me? My mum. She got there just before me and grabbed the barrel of the gun. The bloke was standing there in shock, so I pushed Mum out of the way and grabbed the gun off him. I hit him straight in the face with it and just kept pounding till he went down. Another couple of them came out and I did the same with them. Then I unloaded the gun and threw it over their roof.
    From then on whenever they saw one of us it was a running blue. By this stage the old man was so crook he’d taken to carrying a big shifter and a bottle of ammonia in his back pocket, so that if he got into a blue he could throw the ammonia in the bloke’s face to blind him and take his breath away, then lay into him with the shifter. This one time he was on the main drag, Parramatta Road, when he ran into some of them and pulled out his tools.
    He put a few of them away and came home but they must have got on the blower because next thing about thirty of them turned up and were mobbing up the end of the street. The old man told Mum to boil up some water on the stove, so she was filling up the pots, and all these blokes were marching down the street and banging on the front wall. We had an eight–foot cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, which some of these blokes were trying to scale. The old man and I were belting them with pick handles.
    Dad yelled out to Mum to tip the water, so she and my sister Patricia started pouring the boiling water from the second-storey windows. These blokes were jumping up and down while Dad and I kept laying into them. One bloke got halfway over and my German shepherd leapt up and grabbed him by the leg. He was stuck on the barbed wire,