A powerful Melbourne crime family. A teenage protected witness. The killing of two policemen. Terror. Violence. Loyalty. On a cool spring morning two policemen were lured into a leafy street in Melbourne, Australia and gunned down. Police investigators pulled out all stops to find the killers, for an astounding two and a half years. Then the men they found were acquitted. The police's case against the two brothers and two friends of their family had fallen apart. The accused were free to leave the court. In Walsh Street, Australia's most famous criminal family comes to life: Kath Pettingill, the fierce matriarch; her eldest son, Dennis, drug dealer and killer; her daughter, Vicki, a protected police witness; her youngest, Trevor, and her other son Victor Peirce, two of the four men charged with the murders; and her grandson Jason-harassed by Kath's dogs and the family's enemies alike. Includes a new foreword from the author with updates on all the major players.

The matriarch of Australia’s most violent and notorious criminal family, and allegedly the inspiration for the award-winning film Animal Kingdom, tells her side of the story. Kathy Pettingill is a name that’s both respected and feared, not only by Australia’s criminal underworld, but by many in the Victorian police force. As the matriarch at the head of the most notorious and violent family of habitual offenders in Australian criminal history, her life has revolved around murder, drugs, prison, prostitution and bent coppers – and the intrigue and horror that surround such crimes. Her eldest son, Dennis Allen, was a mass murderer and a $70,000-a-week drug dealer who dismembered a Hell’s Angel with a chainsaw. Two younger sons were acquitted of the Walsh Street murders, the cold-blooded assassination of two police officers that changed the face of crime in Melbourne forever. One of the two, Victor, was gunned down himself in the street 14 years later, becoming the third son Kathy has buried. In this revised and updated authorised edition of Adrian Tame’s bestselling The Matriarch, Kathy Pettingill reveals the chilling truth behind many of the myths and legends that surround her family, including her experiences in the blood-spattered charnel house at the centre of Dennis Allen’s empire of drugs and violence. But this is no plea for pity. Forthright and deeply disturbing, like its subject, The Matriarch pulls no punches. Updated and revised for a new generation, this true crime classic is as terrifying and powerful as when it was first published.

Jason Moran was in his blue Mitsubishi van when he was gunned down with his friend, Pasquale Bardora, in front of up to 250 people in the car park of the Cross Keys Hotel. At least five children, including Moran's twin girl and boy, aged six, and his brother's own fatherless children were in the van when the gunman fired. While murdering two men in front of hundreds of people might, at first, seem wreckless, to the killer, it made perfect sense...' From the authors that brought you Mark Bradon Read's Chopper, comes a true account of the most bloodcurdling gang violence you will ever read. For the last ten years a war has raged on once safe suburban streets that has stunned the world. The killings have been particularly callous and brutal: mothers gunned down with their babies sleeping beside them, fathers killed in front of their children and couples shot down in cold blood. This is true crime at its most bloody, surreal and terrifying.

More than one thousand entries and more than one hundred photographs present an entertaining history of the often quirky origins of St. Paul place names, from A Street to Zimmermann Place and including parks, lakes, streams, roads, cemeteries, bridges, neighborhoods, and many other landmarks. Original.

Dangerous to Know documents murders known and not so well known, conmen and their victims, street gangs of the early twentieth century, crime lords of the 1920s, dock wars of the 1970s, bikers, sex offenders, and the drug gangs of today as well as the wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. They're all here, as well as some of the police, lawyers and judges who have tried to deal with them.