by Adrian Tame
Charges varied from as little as $10 for a couple of minutes, to as much as the punter would wear. But the girls who charged the least often had to work the hardest. A friend of Kathy’s in a parlour in Fitzroy would see up to forty clients in one shift. And the milk of human kindness hardly flowed freely among the four bosses.
One girl came in with Vick’s Vapour on, she had a chest cold. The boss made her have a cold shower, and locked her clothes in the boot of his car to get rid of the smell. Made her do extra to get her clothes back.
Kathy had a better reputation than most of the madams. An exprostitute nicknamed The Talking Bone who she employed in her parlours for three years speaks warmly of her generosity. ‘Most parlours were on a fifty-fifty take in those days, half for the girl, half for the boss,’ she says. ‘Kathy only charged us $10, or $12 at the outside, for however long. She was straight down the line and she looked after you if there was trouble. Dennis, too. I remember one guy decided to strangle me on the bed, and Dennis threw him out on the street with his pants down.’
The big difference between today’s underworld and that of Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s is drugs. Before the 1980s armed robbery was the quick route to a fortune and instant respect from other criminals. Today wealth and prestige in the underworld is enjoyed by those who sell the most smack (heroin) or speed.
There’s no honour now. Not now, not much. They’re all snivelling junkies, not good crims. The good crims are the ones that don’t take it. It’s a very small club left at the moment, they provide for one another. If you look after somebody you get repaid in kind. A debt is not forgotten. A relative of mine named John looked after someone in the remand centre, spoke to him nicely, just looked after him, a first-timer, and when the bloke got out, John didn’t think any more about it, but the bloke bought John’s wife a washing machine for over $600.
When my friend Anthony Farrell’s grandmother Patsy was arrested on a big drug raid, and I saw her on the news dragged into Russell Street in the middle of the night, I got Victor’s wife Wendy to ring up the gaol and tell them that Patsy was coming in, and she was a friend of mine. Then I wrote straightaway to a girl named Irene who was doing a lot for a murder up at Moe, the gaol where Patsy was going, and she looked after her there. Well Patsy can’t believe that she was looked after so well, and she owes me, she says. She was scared stiff and worried.
But scores were not always settled for positive reasons. When a friend of Kathy’s had his car shot up for ‘mucking around with a boxer’s wife’, Dennis evened up during a forty-eight-hour leave from Pentridge. “They hit this flat in Northcote where the boxer lived, and the boxer ran down the street in the nude to get away,’ Kathy recalls with a chuckle. ‘Dennis went back to gaol and nobody knew about it.’
Kathy could always look after herself, and her kin, physically. Her younger boys were beginning to get into trouble and by November 1975, and with his seventeenth birthday approaching, Victor was in Turana Boys’ Home, but escaped to celebrate the occasion with the family at home in High Street, Northcote. Kathy was unable to join in the festivities as she had had a minor operation on her foot that morning. She was lying in bed upstairs when suddenly bedlam broke out in the street below. She hobbled down with her foot swathed in bandages to see four men in suits—obviously detectives—standing over Victor and his brother Lex, one with a gun at Victor’s head.
She only has a dim memory of a girlfriend handing her a cloth handbag containing a large bottle of perfume, but a moment later she was out in the street and striking the man with the gun a crunching blow over the skull. As he slumped to the ground, his head split open, blood gushing, Lex felled one of the other detectives with a chop of his hand and Victor bolted down the street to safety.
Blood streaming down his face, Kathy’s victim got to his feet and stamped viciously on her bandaged foot, then began tearing wildly at her clothing. ‘I’m putting you in the morgue, you fucking arsehole,’ he screamed, as another detective pulled him off.
Some months later Kathy was taken in for questioning over Victoria’s most celebrated armed hold-up, the Great Bookie Robbery. As she was hustled into the squad office she spotted the man she’d bashed grinning at her from behind his desk. ‘Don’t smirk at me, you dog,’ she yelled. ‘You would’ve been fucking dead if I’d wanted to kill you.’
As Kathy tells it, the room went suddenly quiet. The first person to speak was the detective leading her in. ‘Yeah, believe it,’ he said. ‘She could have.’ No-one argued.
* * *
At age sixty, as she straightens up at the front of the oven from where she has just removed one of her famous boiled fruit cakes, Kathy looks at me across the room in her ocean-side hideaway cottage. I’ve just asked her whether one of Dennis’s soldiers (bodyguards) with whom she fought was a big man. ‘No,’ she says, as if I should know better than to ask. ‘But he was taller than me. Anyone’s big who’s taller than me.’ She has a point. At five foot nothing with her grey hair and glasses, Kathy looks about as deadly a streetfighter as the Queen Mother. But appearances are misleading. A lot of good men, and women, have underestimated her to their cost. Not that Kathy is particularly proud of her reputation as a brawler. It’s just a fact of life, like prison. ‘There’s nothing special about fighting,’ she says. ‘It’s just something you sometimes have to do.’
Remembering the victim of the perfume bottle, now no longer a police officer but a prominent figure in legal and sporting circles, Kathy has this to say:
I split his head open when he was a D [detective] in the armed robbery squad, and he has to live with that forever. Everybody thought it was a gun in that bag, but it was a dirty big bottle of perfume. I got charged and I got a $200 fine. When I see him I have a giggle because he’s got to live with the fact that a five-foot woman put him down.
But it wasn’t only Kathy’s sons who were getting into trouble. In 1970 Vicki, her oldest daughter, had her first child, Jason, at the age of sixteen, and a second, Mark, a year later, thus continuing the family tradition of mid-teen motherhood.
Jason was to play a role of almost unthinkable significance in the family’s history as he reached adolescence. But back in the early 1970s it was his mother Vicki who was becoming a problem for Kathy.
Vicki ran away with three of my boyfriends. The first was a bloke I fell in love with from West Heidelberg, when we were living in the village. The next was a bloke I was going out with for nine years, but I never lived with him, because he was a mummy’s boy, and he barracked for Collingwood, and I can’t stand Collingwood. He had a Collingwood bedspread, Collingwood carpet, Collingwood curtains. We used to go on their family picnics, and in the end I got fed up, bloody Collingwood.
The third one was much later, one of Dennis’s soldiers in Richmond. He was much too young for me. He had been in gaol and asked me to come to his welcome home party. So after I shut the drug shopII for the night, I just went up there in my casual gear, and there was a lot of young girls there, and their hearts were all beating and that, and he’s come straight up to me, and I’m thinking what the hell’s going on here? I got a bit flattered and carried away, and then he became one of the soldiers. With that—I’m always the last to know about it—Vicki started to live with him. But I was glad to get rid of him—he was too young. I was just flattered. Anyway he used to bash Vicki, and that’s the reason why Jason ran away and come to live in Richmond.
However much Kathy resented Vicki’s behaviour over her boyfriends, it paled in comparison with her reaction to a series of events in the late 1970s. It was Vicki who was unwittingly responsible for Kathy losing an eye in a celebrated shooting incident in October 1978.
Unknown to Kathy, Vicki had been arrested and charged over a dubious cheque while shopping in the outer suburb of Doncaster. A friend of sorts of the family, Kim Nelson, heard of Vicki’s plight, drove to the police station and handed over the $300 bail to secure her freedom. Next morning Kathy went to Kim Nelson’s house in Otter Street, C
ollingwood, and was surprised to find Vicki there, thinking she was still under arrest. Kim told her: ‘It was only three hundred, and I got her out.’
Months passed without Vicki repaying the debt and Kim Nelson understandably became annoyed at her cavalier attitude. Then on 1 October Kathy went to visit her son Lex in a block of Housing Commission flats in Wellington Parade, Collingwood, accompanied by Dennis. On the way Dennis told her that Kim Nelson and another woman, Keryn Thompson, were in a flat elsewhere in the building, where Vicki was staying with friends. He also mentioned that Vicki had not yet repaid the $300, and Kathy decided to call in and give Kim Nelson the money on her daughter’s behalf.
What neither Dennis nor Kathy knew was that the two women were actually lying in wait for Vicki with a .22 rifle belonging to Kim Nelson which had been used in a shooting incident at the Gasometer Hotel in Collingwood a few weeks previously. The weapon had been confiscated by the police, but then returned to Nelson by an officer who subsequently left the force. According to Kathy, ‘he went white when I accused him about it later.’
Unsuspectingly Dennis and Kathy made their way to the flat.
The lifts were out, and we walked up a flight of stairs, and I knocked at the door. Kim and Keryn called out: ‘Who is it?’ ‘It’s me, Kathy, I’ve got the money for you.’ I had it in my hand. I hear: ‘Is the safety on?’ and I’m thinking they mean the door. I’m standing facing Dennis, and I had a pair of wedgie shoes on, maybe if I hadn’t had them on, it might have gone over my head, or it could have gone right into my brain. And I feel the hit. It’s a quarter to nine at night. And I look at Dennis and say: ‘I’ve been shot.’ He said: ‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’ I can see my eye on his shirt, his T-shirt. I can feel the blood pumping out of my head. I know enough about first aid, having had all those kids, to lay down, keep quiet, keep calm. With that Lex came, he must have heard the shot from the next floor up. Somebody must have rung the police and the ambulance. The ambulance came and they spoke to me and said: ‘What’s your age, date of birth and all that?’ and I told them, and then they put me out.
Before that Lex is going crook at the police: ‘Leave my mother alone.’ And they thought I was going to die anyway. Kim and Keryn were waiting for Vicki to come, to shoot her, because she hadn’t paid back the $300. They didn’t believe me when I said I’d brought the money, so they shot me anyway. I got to know who pulled the trigger. It was Keryn, but it was Kim Nelson’s gun. They meant to shoot someone through the door, it didn’t go off by accident. Anyway, they hid the gun under the baby’s mattress in the cot. I’m within minutes of death in the hospital, and all that shit. And I had about six different operations, plastic surgery to do up the hole. I had a piece of chicken tendon to keep my eye stitched to my head, because when I’m asleep it’s still open.
While she was waiting to be operated on after being rushed to hospital, police were at Kathy’s side. ‘I don’t know what I said to them,’ she claims, ‘but it was a dying statement. Then Lex told them to piss off.’ Whatever it was Kathy said, Nelson and Thompson were soon arrested and appeared in court charged with attempted murder and other offences. During one of her court appearances nine days after the shooting, Nelson caused a furore in court when she was refused bail. ‘Okay, so I’m a known prostitute, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have bail,’ she said, adding that she had a seventeen-year-old daughter, a dog and a cat to look after at home. Magistrate Alexander Vale still refused her request. ‘Thanks for listening, you mug,’ she screamed from the dock. ‘I hope you rot in hell.’
Between surgery, Kathy lay in state in her hospital room, decked out in floral splendour.
Painters and dockers used to bring in flowers, out of respect for my sons. Every time I came back from an operation the room was full of flowers. There was a rort on with the flowers. I’d hate to have died because it was like a big bloody funeral parlour, every bloody room I was in. ‘Cos they looked in the phone book, get a name, you could do it in those days, get away with it, send flowers under false names. They did it every day, the prostitutes, everybody I knew.
Kim’s and Keryn’s fellows had come in and brought flowers. The minute I could get out of bed I went to the phone with the drip in my arm and I rang the gaol and said to tell the girls they’re sweet. I just wanted them to know I was alive and well, and everything would be sweet. That was our code. And that gave them a chance to get bail. If I was to die they wouldn’t have got bail.’
Kathy remained in hospital for a fortnight before signing herself out, still so sick she had to go back in for further treatment. Despite this she drove her car to a hotel in Preston to visit friends. ‘The minute I walked in with my head all bandaged, they all stood up and clapped. It was a crims’ pub. They were just glad to see me alive.’
Kathy lay low during the lengthy period between the shooting and the attempted murder trial. She knew she was the main prosecution witness, but hoped to avoid appearing. She later realised how naive this was.
I was in and out of the parlour in Stephenson Street, Richmond. I’d go in the front and out the back and they’d come looking for me to go to court.
While I was waiting for the trial I flew back from Sydney and Mad Dog Murphy [ex Victorian police officer Brian Murphy] was on security duty at Tullamarine. He said: ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’ I said: ‘You don’t know where I live.’ He drove me right to me fucking door. I shit myself. Here I am thinking they don’t know where I live. I finally got to court and I said to Kim: ‘Tell the barrister not to put shit on me for being a prostitute and all that fucking shit, and you’ll be sweet.’ Then I saw the police photos of myself laying there, and all that blood. God I got a shock. I didn’t say much in evidence. I was all for them. I said it was just an accident. I got ’em off. They were both acquitted. Afterwards Kim Nelson said to me: ‘And now I’ll have the $300.’ And I said to her: ‘I fucking paid, cunt. I paid.’
What happened next provides an insight into Kathy’s thinking and the unspoken criminal code by which she lives. The prospect of informing on Nelson and Thompson in court was unthinkable: it would have destroyed forever Kathy’s reputation in the underworld. But that didn’t mean she had to lie down and accept what had happened to her.
Some years later, in a house in Richmond owned by her son Dennis, she had a confrontation with Thompson where she sought to even the score. Dennis, his younger brother Jamie, two men and Thompson were together in a room when one of the men, nicknamed Snaggles, put a gun, albeit playfully, to Dennis’s head. Jamie didn’t see the funny side, and shot the second man in the leg, causing Snaggles to drop his gun saying: ‘Fuck this, youse play for real.’
At this point Kathy walked into the house, saw Thompson and attempted to wrestle the gun from Jamie.
I said: ‘Jamie, gimme the gun, gimme the gun, gimme the gun.’ It was my opportunity to get even. But she was too fat. We would’ve had to cut half of her off to get her into the barrel.III I couldn’t have stood up in court and said: ‘This fucking bitch shot me,’ but I could have shot her. We would have got rid of her. That’s the code we live by.
As it happened, Jamie refused to hand over his gun and Kathy lost her chance. But losing an eye was something she eventually adapted to, although eighteen years later she still occasionally misses the sink when washing up and drops a dish on the floor. But then, as she says, she never experiences double vision after drinking too much. She received $5,000 compensation for her injury, but even that didn’t help her to forgive Keryn Thompson.
* * *
I. A major player in the underworld. He once gave evidence on Victor’s behalf saying: ‘Your honour, I wouldn’t lie for Victor Peirce, but I’d kill for him.’
II. Premises in Richmond from where Kathy and her family trafficked in drugs.
III. A reference to the disposal of the body of Anton Kenny, one of Dennis’s murder victims, in a barrel.
CHAPTER FOUR
Stone Walls Do Not . . .
THE DAY
THE MINISTER comes to Fairlea Prison for his inspection they move a bunk into the woman’s cell. Previously she has been sleeping in her nightdress on the cold stone floor of the punishment block. As soon as the Minister leaves, so does the bunk. Kathy has found out and, ever the champion of the underdog, is up before a senior prison official, articulating her rage. The prisoner in question has a medical condition, causing a hormonal imbalance. According to Kathy, she shouldn’t be in prison at all. And the reason she stabbed the sewing teacher had more to do with her condition and general mistreatment than any particularly malicious intent. That’s just the start of the harangue. ‘And what about handcuffing her behind her back, and keeping her in her cell twenty-three hours a day? You can’t do that, the Geneva Convention . . .’
The senior official looks up coldly at the warder standing beside Kathy, her voice knife-edged with contempt. ‘How long has she been down there?’ Kathy doesn’t allow the warder time to respond. ‘Four fucking months, to my knowledge.’ The official stands up behind her desk. ‘Come with me, I’ll fix that.’ The trio, official, warder and Kathy troop through the corridors, waiting as doors are unlocked, and stop outside the solitary confinement cell. The official peers through the bars, and orders the warder to unlock the door. ‘Get outside!’ The woman, vulnerable and frightened in her nightie, steps gingerly across the threshold of the cell. ‘Now, back in there.’ As the woman, cowed and obedient, does as she’s told, the cell doors clang shut again. The official turns to Kathy, her eyes glinting: ‘Right, she’s been out, hasn’t she? Happy now?’
Kathy’s internal controls go into overload. She’s a whisper away from launching a physical attack on the official. Instead she spits at her feet. Her words come out like sharp-edged flints dipped in venom. Her voice is trembling and hoarse with emotion: ‘You fucking thing. You get fucked every day by your fucking dog. Up the arse.’ That’s for now. For the next sixteen days Kathy goes on hunger strike, doesn’t eat a morsel, and loses over twelve kilos. And for the rest of her stay every time she passes the board bearing the staff list of prison officials, she spits squarely on the woman’s name. Today she says: ‘The rat, the fucking dog, she’ll never forget me.’