Enforcer (5 page)

We kept the club pretty small. It was hard to find blokes that my brothers wanted in the club because they used to judge everyone solely on their fighting ability. I was more of the opinion that a bloke should be judged on how good he would be for the club, and what he could bring to the club. But Wheels, Bull, Shadow, Snake and Wack thought that if a bloke couldn’t fight, he should hit the highway. The problem was that to find blokes who could fight as good as my brothers was practically impossible. To this day, I think there’s probably been two that have been beaten once. One of them was dead drunk, and the other one had about five on him and got hit in the head with a steel rubbish bin.

Nevertheless, hanging round the Cross we managed to pick up a few nominees. One was a bloke by the name of Schultz who was a minder for the girls they had working above the Venus Room. If anyone started roughing up one of the girls he’d throw them down the stairs. He could fight, and he was a big boy. He was a power lifter. We’d see him at the gym bench pressing 600 pounds. I was round at his flat one day, and he had this industrial blender. He chucked in nearly half a tin of protein powder and some milk, and drank what must have been two or three litres of protein drink, then scoffed two chooks and a slab of tuna.

He bought himself a Rigid Sporty, which is like a chopper, and got himself acquainted with his new wheels. Each time the bike went down he’d grab it round the frame with one hand and just pick it up off the ground. We’d all be standing there in awe, just looking at him. He was a monster, with a chest like a barrel and no neck. When we went shopping to get him a vest to put his colours on, the biggest one they had wouldn’t go halfway round Schultz. They had to get a whole skin in to customise a vest for him.

I remember one night up at the Venus Room we got word that all the bouncers in the Cross were coming to get the Gladiators. The story went that a renowned underworld figure had hired them because Chop had beaten up his son over some sheila.

We sat there waiting for these bouncers. The Venus Room had a real narrow hallway that you had to walk down to get into the main bar, so we figured that if these bouncers came for us, we’d just stand at the end of the hallway and bash them two at a time as they reached us.

Well, we saw all these Maoris coming down, and at the time most of the bouncers up the Cross were Maoris. So we started bashing them. Bull had a chain, Shadow had a baseball bat, and we were pounding the shit out of them, bodies everywhere. Then all of a sudden Wack yelled out, ‘Hang on! Hang on! Have a look at their legs.’ Nearly every one of them was wearing shorts and socks. Turned out it was actually two grades of a rugby union team. They’d come over from New Zealand to play some district clubs out here, walked into the Venus Room for a night out, and had the shit pounded out of them.

We helped them up and called the ambulance then took off before the cops showed up.

O
NE NIGHT
in 1972 I was riding back through Haymarket in town when I came across a bunch of wogs belting this young boy of about ten and trying to drag his older sister into their car. I hopped off the bike and gave the four blokes a hiding.

The young sheila was terrified so I asked her where she lived.

‘About two blocks from here.’

‘I’ll ride me bike real slow and walk ya home.’

I had my feet on the ground, the bike more or less idling along. When we got there she said, ‘You come upstairs, meet my grandfather.’

I took my bike up in the freight elevator and rolled it out into this big room set up with heavy bags and large cane baskets. It turned out to be a kyite studio and her grandfather was the sensei. Kyite is a North Korean martial art not normally taught to Europeans, but the sensei was so grateful I’d helped his grandkids that he offered to teach me.

The art of kyite is to destroy your opponent. There’s none of this self-defence, search-for-enlightenment business like in
The Karate Kid
. Your defence is that you go in and beat the shit out of the other bloke, so that he can’t hurt you. The baskets in the studio were full of barley or wheat, and once you’d learnt the correct technique you could use your fist or, more commonly in kyite, your palm, to drive your arm through the grain right up to your elbow. Which meant you could hit pretty hard.

Kyite also finessed my knife skills, teaching the art of fighting in really close with a small curved blade, like a skinning knife, that can cut and rip at the same time. You’re trained to block out everything around you and just concentrate on the knife in front of you so that after a while it becomes automatic and you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.

I got up to a fifth-degree black belt, having added some nice new skills to my fighting repertoire. And I was about to get the chance to put some of those skills to use.

I’
D HEARD
up the Cross about an underground fighting scene run by my boss, the Little King. So I got in contact with him and asked if he could get me into it. I had to give him my word I’d never mention anything about him or the fighting to anyone, not even my brothers. Then it was just a matter of waiting for a phone call.

It might have been a month before the phone rang. ‘You got twenty-four hours, get ready. You’ll get a call at seven tomorrow night.’

Next night another call came through telling me where to go. The fights were held all over the place. They could be in a factory or an underground car park – anywhere you could get a large group of people together. The punters would get the same message: ‘Caesar’s fighting tomorrow night. You’ll get a phone call telling you where.’ There might be eighty or a hundred people in the crowd, sometimes double that – mostly suits and socialites with a smattering of knockabouts. Some of them were very high-profile people, the sort that would raise eyebrows if they were caught out mixing it with the underworld. We even had members of parliament come along.

The organisers would bring in fighters from around Australia and even overseas. Well-known boxers and martial artists. I’d be in trackies and bare feet. You can do a lot more with your feet if you haven’t got shoes on. You can stick your toes in your opponent’s eye.

There were no weapons, but that was as far as the rules went. It was bare-knuckled, anything goes. Something like the Jean-Claude Van Damme film
Wrong Bet
, or the reality TV show
The Ultimate Fighter
, only ten times more hard-core. You could take a bloke’s eye out, hit him in the nuts, jam his nasal bone up into his brain, whatever it took to win the fight. There was no ref to make sure no one died.

The purse was usually around ten to fifteen grand, put up by the Little King and two associates of his. I never knew their names but I knew they were well-known straight businessmen. They’d all be there at the fights and made big money betting on the side. A lot of the bigwigs in the crowd were splashing out some serious cash on their bets, too.

There were always about thirty seats for the heavies and big shots encircling the ring – which was a rope circle on the floor. Everyone else stood. Sometimes you’d see blokes with a bottle of Scotch, but there was no bar. This was just a matter of getting in, having the one to three fights on the card, and getting out.

When I first started I was happy just winning the fifteen-grand purse, but then I saw all this money changing hands on the side and I realised that punting was where the real money was being made. I went to the Little King and asked him if I could bring one of my brothers to make bets on the side like I’d seen the organisers doing.

‘All right, you can tell one brother,’ he said. ‘But you gotta make sure that brother knows that he’s not to tell anyone else in your family what’s going on.’

So I had a word with Shadow and he promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. He came to the next fight with me and used some of the money I’d won on the earlier fights to bet with. We started making some real money that way. In the early days, I got five to one, because nobody knew anything about me. But after I beat this well-known martial artist from Malaysia the odds shortened. Then I beat a very well-known American former champion. He might have beaten me in a boxing ring, but this wasn’t boxing.

I liked the underground fighting because every bloke you went in against would be a top bluer, otherwise he wouldn’t have been there. And there was no referee or doctor on standby. You never knew whether you were going to win. Even so, I always went in thinking I would. That’s something my old man drummed into me. He’d tell me, ‘Always know that you gotta be careful. But never go into a fight thinking that you’re going to lose, or thinking that the bloke might be better than ya. Always go in thinking that you’re gunna beat the bloke easy.’

So I used to go into the fights thinking, Well, you’ll be done in thirty seconds. And sometimes that’s all it took. Other times it took a bit longer to drop the bloke, maybe two minutes. If you wanted to kill him, that took thirty seconds less.

Once the fight was over, everyone would collect their bets and disappear.

O
NE NIGHT
me and Snake got a phone call from this sheila Sue. She went out with Mousey, the sergeant-at-arms from the Vikings, and was a really nice sheila, real staunch. She said, ‘Can you do us a favour?’

‘What?’

‘Can you drive me out to Cronulla? There’s a bloke out there who has some nine-carat gold cigarette lighters for sale and I wanna buy one for each member of the Vikings for Christmas.’

I thought that was pretty good of her, so I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll drive you out.’

When we turned up at her place, she had a girlfriend with her.

‘Who’s this?’ Snake asked.

‘This is Joanne, Little Billy’s old lady.’

‘Who’s Little Billy?’ Snake asked.

‘He’s a member of the Executioners.’

‘Yeah, all right.’ So we drove Sue and Joanne out to Cronulla.

When we returned, Joanne’s old man, Little Billy, was waiting. With a name like Little Billy, we’d expected him to be some gigantic bloke, but he actually turned out to be a little fella. He grabbed Joanne and started carrying on at us. ‘Whaddya doing takin’ me old lady out?’

Without missing a beat Snake’s just gone,
whack
. Knocked him flat on his back, teeth scattering. ‘Now you crawl over here and kiss my foot,’ Snake said.

Little Billy crawled over and kissed Snake’s foot. Snake turned to Joanne. ‘Well, we’ll be seein’ ya.’

‘All right. See ya.’

I rang Sue the following week, after Christmas, to see how the cigarette lighters had gone down.

‘Oh, not as well as I thought,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Mousey didn’t like it.’ I could hear in her voice that something was wrong.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’m coming over.’ I hopped on the bike and rode over to her place. There she was with this big black eye and a swollen lip that was just going down.

‘How come you got them?’ I asked.

‘Mousey got the shits that I let you and Snake drive me out to Cronulla.’

‘Didn’t you explain you were getting Christmas presents for all the blokes in his club?’

‘Yeah, but you know how he feels about you.’ He always thought there was something going on between me and Sue, which there wasn’t.

I waited for Mousey to get home from work and when he walked in the door I said, ‘Did you bash her because she went out to Cronulla with me?’

‘Oh no, Ceese, no, no. It was just an argument.’

‘Well this is just an argument.’
Whack
. I kicked the shit out of him. I made him crawl over to Sue and said, ‘Unless she asks me to stop, I’m gunna keep kickin’ the shit outta you.’ He was begging her to get me to stop stomping on him. She looked down at him and a big smile came across her face. ‘All right, Mousey. Caesar, don’t hurt him any more.’

I leant over and grabbed him by the hair. ‘You ever lay a hand on her again and I’ll be back to finish you off. You’ll be going for a ride you won’t like.’ He knew exactly what I meant because I used to do other work – you know, taking people on holidays that they didn’t find their way back from.

***

S
HADOW WAS
driving a mate home through Summer Hill one night when his mate said, ‘Shadow, pull over. I wanna take a leak.’

So Shadow pulled over and the mate hopped out.

In fact, his mate didn’t need to take a leak, he’d actually seen this bloke walking down the street with a case of beer. He grabbed the beer, pushed the bloke over and jumped back in Shadow’s car.

Shadow drove off but the bloke got the licence plate number. When the cops turned up at Shadow’s place they charged him with assault and robbery. The coppers said to him, ‘We know there was another bloke with you. Give us his name and we’ll go easy on you.’

‘Get fucked. I dunno what you’re talking about.’

So he did some time in Goulburn and Emu Plains.

A few days before Shadow was due out, we got on the phone to Sue and tracked down her girlfriend Joanne who we’d driven to Cronulla. We went and picked her up, along with two other sheilas, little Anne and Julie, who had the biggest tits you’ve ever seen, and took them back to Mum’s. We wanted to give Shadow a warm welcome-home gift.