Tell us about the time....

Tell us more about your early years in Oz Nick.

It sounds like your early years made your later years in the Legion look like the boy scouts by comparison!

What the...

Mate, some of the stories are over on GT's if you want to search them. The others are going to have to wait till I get my book written. (Trying to decide to do one on the Legion and one on Oz or just do one with it all in).

Basically I led a fairly sheltered early life...private school and so on. A disease that nearly killed me when I was six prevented me from playing team sports during the formulative years so I ended up latching on to Judo at about age nine and then I became a fanatic (in the truest sense of the word i.e. eschewing parties, pop culture, girls, sports, drinking and smoking with the boys etc) about the martial arts. At age fifteen my brother took me to Zen Do Kai and I rose through the ranks faster than most due to workouts at home with my brother, my fanatacism, and my Judo, TKD and so on background.

At 16 I began work on the doors ending up on the door of a notorious strip club owned by Italian crooks who ran brothels and illegal casinos and paid off law enforcement. It got pretty heavy at times, notably the fight with the Kung Fu school, the war between organized crime in Sydney and their equivalent up north, the aboriginal gangs, vietnamese gangs, biker gangs and all out brawlers. I was stabbed and cut a few times, shot at once or twice and so on. It did set me up in good stead for my soujourn in the Legion.

Nick

Nick,

I am really surprised that you led a sheltered life when you were a kid!!After reading about you starting bouncing at sixteeen,and then joining the French Foreign Legion I always thought that you would have had anything but a sheltered life.

I had a sheltered life growing up,could never have bounced at sixteen (was too small apart from anything else).For me,sheltering a kid is a form of crippling them.

Where did you get the guts to do all the stuff you did?

I reckon a book on your early days in Oz would be a huge seller! I'm in Australia and have read some of the earlier posts in GT's forum. There's definately a brilliant read amongst all that.

Probably best to stay in the States after the book's released here though. The boys in blue might be lining up in droves to lock you up!

If they did, I'd be at the back.

Brian

What the et al...

Re the boys in blue...actually a lot of them were locked up mate, including the police commissioner at the time, the minister for the police and half of the vice squad to name but a few.

If memory serves it was the Fitzgerald Enquiry (will have to research that) and it was initiated by her majesty's govt due to the incredible amount of corruption in the force at the time (In fact, Interpol determined at one point that the 3 most corrupt police forces were Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Brisbane, Australia. Given the vast numbers of police departments around the world that's really saying something)

Half of the vice sqad owned brothels (ironic) and took payments from the guys I worked for as well as coming in for free drinks and time spent with the hookers upstairs in the brothel. There was beatings of suspects, payoffs, killings, planted evidence and it went through the entire force. I was actually asked to testify at the enquiry but was gadding about Djibouti at the time with the Legion so I never went. Even the premier of the State of QLD was found guilty of perjury.

Nick

PS: I was actually there the day the police blocked traffic while the crane hoisted the roulette table in through the 2nd floor window of the illegal casino. Despite being shown hidden camera film of the interior of the casino the Minister for Police denied their existence claiming it was a fabrication by the media. They never knew that he actually owned the building the casino was in and rented it to the two Italians I worked for. Outrageous. They'd be more likely to put a bullet in my head than lock me up I would think, though this many years later it probably wouldn't effect anyone. Old news by now.