Why don’t they write these books about Pymble?

Yet another book documenting the chequered history of Kings Cross has been published.

The latest, Kings Cross Double Cross, is the self-told history of Frank ‘Tubby’ Black, who ran strip clubs, carried $150k at a time in payola to then NSW Premier Robert Askin, dealt with all the legendary crims and corrupt cops of Sydney’s underground, pulled scam after scam with his accident-prone brother Rocky and routinely did time in jail through his life.

‘I consider myself a larrikin and a lover,’ he writes. ‘I was a cat with nine wives.’

‘I did the crimes and I did the time.’

He’s not exaggerating, either, and he names them all in his books. Tubby can’t read or write so the book, subtitled from Boy’s home to Bagman, was dictated to David Dunne who produced and published it.

It all started at six years old when Tubby was caught milking gas meters and sent to a boys’ home, but he says he has settled down now. He’s 86, vision-impaired and lives in Kempsey which he loves. Meeting him in a Hyde Park Hotel apartment where he was staying with his wife and teenage daughter Bianca, who was a gracious hostess, makes you wonder about rights, wrongs and just deserts.

The limited-edition book was launched and is available at The Cross Art + Books in Roslyn St Potts Point. At the launch, local barrister Malcolm Duncan spoke:

‘It is an important memoir of the Cross as many of us who have lived here did not know it. It takes us into a world of violence and corruption but more, it says something about the failing of a system which allowed a person with obvious talent to mis-use it and waste it. It is to be hoped that some reputable publisher takes it up, cleans it up, fills in the dates giving it a proper chronology so that it can take its place as a memoir of a period in Sydney’s history alongside classics like Cyril Pearl’s Wild Men of Sydney and Lennie Lower’s Here’s Luck.‘