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punishment. He had to eat a full packet of lit smokes one after the other, swallow them down with a bottle of ouzo then receive a sound beating. It was either that or a shot in both legs. Dave ate the cigarettes — all lit — then polished off the ouzo to kill the pain of the coming beating. We broke his face up well. In fact, he lost his front teeth. All was forgiven.
    The Surrey Road gang didn’t muck around. Cowboy Johnny wouldn’t eat the smokes or drink the ouzo or take his beating so Dave shot him in both legs with a sawn-off .22. We dug the slugs out with a potato knife. Johnny then went to hospital. No slugs, no police.
    Terry the Tank refused his punishment once and the three of us attacked him. Had Terry carried on and entered the criminal world full on, he would have been a force to be reckoned with. Physically, he was as strong as 10 men. However, we got him in the end. Dave was mad keen on shooting him in the legs, but Terry agreed on the standard pack of lit smokes, ouzo and a sound flogging.
    A crew can’t expect to dish it out if it can’t take it as well, and we were a top crew. Violence and street combat was our religion. I was the general, and I ruled with an iron fist. Great days.
    *
    My 19th birthday party was going to be a big event in my life. To be honest I never had a proper birthday party. Seventh Day Adventist birthday parties for children in the Read home ended up as prayer meetings. So by the time I was turning 19 and not living at home I wanted a real one to make up for all the other years.
    I set about getting ready for the big day. I had a one bedroom flat in Williams Road, South Yarra. I emptied most of the furniture out. Then I rang the Thomastown Boys via ‘Satchmo’ and the Croydon Boys via ‘Bernie’. I notified ‘Terry the Tank’ and his mates, ‘Mad Charlie’ and his crew, Horatio Morris and his old South and Port Melbourne mates, and Vincent Villeroy and his friends. I told them all to bring the biggest sluts they could lay their hands on. But I didn’t tell any of the crews I’d invited that other crews were coming.
    The big night had come. All was set. I had spent several hundred dollars on grog and the bath tub was full of ice. I put Cowboy Johnny Harris up on the roof of the flats next door with a walkie talkie and a 30-30 lever action hunting rifle so he could let rip if any gatecrashers dared to pull up outside.
    No one came.
    Only my dear old dad, ‘Satchmo’, a few of the Thomastown boys and Robyn the policeman’s daughter.
    It turned out that bloody ‘Terry the Tank’ had rung around and every crew in Melbourne knew the other crews were coming. It was decided behind my back that my 19th would be a bloodbath. I’ve never tried to toss a party since.
    *
    Our gang kept a supply of weapons hidden in the toilets of the South Yarra Arms, the Morning Star hotel and later the Bush Inn hotel. We stashed one sawn-off shotgun, one tomahawk, one meat cleaver and one iron bar in each pub — an idea I got from what the Kray brothers did in London. We also had a very high-powered cattle prod stolen from the Newmarket cattle yards. When we got hold of the leadership of rival gangs, one blast of the cattle prod on the lower guts and their bowels dropped out — shit everywhere.
    The Surrey Road gang was feared. We had blues with the Richmond boys regularly, but as there weren’t many of us, we would go to the home address of our enemy and get him as he walked out, at his own front door. These are the same tactics used by the IRA. We once bashed a rival gang leader as he left the cemetery after his mother’s funeral. Another time we broke the legs of the brother of an enemy — then caught the one we wanted in the waiting room of the Alfred Hospital. It was another IRA trick learnt from my reading of military history.
    Terry the Tank is now a well-to-do honest member of the community with wife and children. Cowboy Johnny is dead. Dave the Jew is living in South Yarra in