Cocaine in the eastern suburbs? Old news.

Ah, the eastern suburbs.

Back in the early 1990's, I spent a lot of time working out at an old-style, hard core body building gym in the Bondi area. It's not like I had the body of a body builder, since I was one of about 3 people in the place not on steroids. And I had all my body hair. The rest had long left theirs on the waxing room floor. I trained there with the Hof, trading reps on our pecs, and his wife and Steph (the man hunter).

During our time of sweat (it was the only non air-conditioned gym in the area), we got to know a few of the characters who worked out there, and partied with them a bit. Being a member of that gym was good for entry into most of the nightclubs in the area, since all the bouncers worked out there.

We got to know one bloke reasonably well. I think his name was Wayne (Hof would have to jog my memory here). We used to see him a lot, and then he disappeared for a long stretch.

He finally surfaced a few months later, and we quizzed him about his absence.

His story was that he had been hiding at his Mum's place, with a loaded M-14 behind the front door (a weapon that was illegal even then). He'd been busted by the police with a kilo or more of coke, and they'd turned him. He was going to grass on his supplier, and his supplier was out to kill him. Apparently he had moved in with his mum after a few bullets went through his front windows.

The funny thing about his bust is that when the police got him originally, he was near the beach, so he ran out into the surf in his clothes whilst eating great wads of coke in an effort to get rid of it. I'm not sure how if that's the right story - I'm sure we were drinking when he told it, and most of my memories from then are filtered through a haze of Tooheys New.

Wayne told us that he was supplying all sorts of well known identities with coke, which was not surprising, given the amount of drugs that were dealt semi-covertly at the gym. Gym parties were a drug dealers paradise. Remember the two cops who shot a Frog at Bondi? They'd been doing coke the day before apparently, and they both worked out at the same gym. I'm sure I must have absorbed a fair amount of drugs through the skin simply from the sweat left on the weight machines.

Anyway, there were lots of rumours flying around of prominent people about to be busted when the cops opened fire back in 1997, but nothing ever came of it. I doubt anything will this time either.