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Bob the Basher

Bob the Basher was a Sydney hoodlum who went out in such a unique fashion that it was the envy of every crook way past his use-by date. They’d tried to kill Bob in the usual gangland tradition by shooting him in public, but that didn’t work. And in the end it wasn’t a bullet that got him. It was his run of bad luck with very expensive cars. Yellow cars.

A big lump of a bloke with a record for assault, malicious injury, resisting arrest, false pretences, breaking and entering and numerous driving offences, Bob Rakish left Sydney’s western suburbs in the early 1970s when he was in his early 30s and quickly infiltrated the lucrative eastern suburbs criminal milieu by bashing whoever they wanted and collecting unpaid debts for SP bookmakers.

It wasn’t long before Bob the Basher, as he was now known, became a force to be reckoned with throughout the pubs in trendy Double Bay, Woollahra and Paddington, and it seemed as though wherever Bob was, there was trouble. In only a short time it was fashionable to have Bob as your minder and he was seen in the best of Sydney’s restaurants, wining and dining with some of the eastern suburb’s better known villains and socialising with the hangers-on.

The Basher quickly graduated from being employed by other gangsters to running his own criminal operation of recycling stolen cars and loan sharking. Bob’s methods of collecting on late payments were legendary. When attacked and stabbed by four men who owed him money, the Basher belted the living daylights out of all of them and hung one from a tree with a noose. The creditor only escaped after the branch broke. Bob got his money.

By 1975 Bob the Basher had, as one policeman put it, ‘orchestrated his own reign of terror’ around the eastern suburbs and was getting out of hand even by criminal standards. A week wouldn’t go by without Bob belting an innocent bystander in a pub and his reputation for head-butting women in public places had seen him barred from several hotels.

Drunk, the Basher was the most obnoxious thug on the planet and you’d only have to look at him sideways and he’d want to belt you. Sober, he was a good bloke and could mix with the hard core criminals and at the same time bask in his notoriety feted upon him by the society fringe dwellers who hung around the more notorious pubs for kicks.

On 27 March 1986, the Basher was having a few drinks with friends at the most fashionable bar in Sydney at the time, Pronto, in Double Bay, when he saw a yellow Rolls Royce with dark windows pull up out the front. The roller was owned by Sydney hotelier Adrian Kaye, who six months earlier had acrimoniously dismissed the Basher as his minder, telling everyone that he had done so because the Basher had developed a reputation as a ‘big time’ brawler and it wasn’t good for his – Kaye’s – image.

The Basher walked from the bar at Pronto and sat in the back seat of the Rolls and closed the door. A few minutes later he left the Rolls and, as the patrons stood aside in horror, went back to the bar, his shirt covered in blood, ordered another drink and collapsed. The Basher later told a newspaper reporter, ‘I didn’t know I was shot until I looked down and saw the claret.’

The Basher survived the shooting and proudly wore the bullet, which the surgeons said was too risky to move, like a badge of honour. The Basher had achieved legend status throughout the underworld. And while it was obvious that he had been shot by someone in the yellow Rolls Royce, no one was ever charged.

The Rolls Royce’s owner, Adrian Kaye, was not so lucky. Two months later he was shot dead at his King Arthur’s Court Hotel in Kings Cross. It was proved that the Basher had nothing to do with it but when he heard the news he burst into laughter and shouted for the bar.

On 3 August that same year, the Basher left Doyle’s restaurant at Watson’s Bay at about 5 pm and went to exclusive Eliza’s restaurant at Double Bay, where he and a male companion drank until 1 am before heading off to a nightclub in the other man’s yellow V12 Boxer Ferrari.

As the Ferrari neared the King’s Cross tunnel it hit a kerb and ploughed into a solid concrete substation at a speed in excess of 110 kilometres an hour. The driver survived but the Basher was killed instantly from massive head injuries.

In the end the Basher went out in the manner in which he lived. In the fast lane.