Billy looked around at his friends from the alleys and lane ways of the docklands of Australia's worse docklands area in over one hundred years. He looked up at them with faint amusement, not really knowing what to say or do: Billy was the proclaimed leader of this rag tail, jerry built, glum lot. They came from every where and were numbered about one hundred of the worst type of thieves pick pockets, robbers, murderers, prostitutes, doll men, rapists and liars in Melbourne. If it was not nailed down or owned securely it was lifted any way they could get it. Crane Emery was a long necked wading sort of a fellow, tall and thin, with shoulder length untidy rusty brown hair, blue eyed devil.
He was Billy double man, and every one could rely absolutely on him for anything dealing with information from any source. Cow-leech Miller had spent most of his time on the farms of out back New South Wales as did his parents before him, but with his restless ways he wondered into crime just as he finished his doctorate degree in cow husbandry. His was a case of mistaken identity, over the chief surgeons daughter. So he fled the city life and ended up in Billy's gang and became a very dangerous man indeed. Crambo Watson was Billy's woman from the moment he found her abandoned on the pier at West Swanson dock ten years earlier (she was just eleven years old at the time). She had a nack of hearing a word or a name of a city and straight away she could put a tune or rhyme to it with in seconds, but she also helped get a lot of young girls for the gangs boys to be their women as well. And in turn they became great pick pockets and forgers.
Billy himself was an educated young man before he took to crime due to a severe streak of hatred against God and anything to do with that God thing. He had been a good fitter and turner when a fight with his foreman and boss placed him in front of the police and the courts at twenty one, in which he had stabbed them almost to death in what he described as self defence: But he had already sized them up for a fight the year before because they were self professing Christians and he hated any one connected with God.
The judges agreed with the eye witness reports that he had instigated every thing over a long period of time and was sentenced eleven years prison for attempted murder. When he came out he went to work on the docks and was immediately received into their midst readily enough and soon he had seen the advantages of setting up a ring of "Lifters” from the docks and from there it was not long before other crimes were on the cards for the lot of them. He was known for putting on a good "Foy' for his gang after a rich haul had netted them thousands of dollars a Lift. Over the years he was seldom caught and always had an alibi for where he was on each occasion of a Lift.
The local mafia left him alone for about ten years, but as his gang grew they became very much interested in having a percentage of his takes. Which caused him no ends of fights with their toughs. One such was "Fougasse" the Italian, who was well known for setting up small cave-in's and landslides from gun powder charges. He was most famous for his dirty fighting with any kind of weapon. The night they met for a show down it was a rainy cold Melbourne wintry night, out side the Seaman's Mission. They ahd been looking for each other for three days and then just as they turned the corner of the building they bumped into each other and instantly it was on.
Knives came out and flashed in the night. Both were severely injured with "Fougasse" dying seven days later; leaving Billy with three stab wounds and cuts across his chest, left leg, and hip, and arm. It was a close call, but Billy survived to be the victor.
Several of these fights over the next seventeen years had left Billy with several scars on his body and with quite a lot of stitches as well. But most of all the toll was telling on Billy and he knew it. But he could not quit either and so he went on and eventually the booze began to take a hold on him in his mid forties, and by the time he was fifty, he knew he was licked. No one needed to tell him he was finished as far as the booze was concerned.
