Tony Birch

So in many of these businesses, that relationship between police,

and business owners had been in place for decades and it functioned relatively well.

And it's important to note that because in an atmosphere where you know that people are going to do something like drink, like gamble, like SP bookmaking, you couldn't allow those to operate unless you had a relationship with police.

Well, she wasn't very tall.

She was vertically challenged.

She was about five foot tall.

Very beautiful woman when she was younger.

She had a quite exotic way of describing herself.

She had about six or seven aliases, surnames.

She did once go by the name of Alma Bordeaux.

And she didn't admit until very much later in life that she had taken the Bordeaux name off a wine bottle so that she often told exotic stories about herself.

She was tattooed, which was very unusual for a woman.

And she was a very tenacious but very warm woman, so I was very close to her.

She passed away when I was 40, so I was able to enjoy a lot of my growing up around her.

She always lived very close by.

My first packet of cigarettes that I bought was the packet of Park Drive, which I bought for 33 cents on Smith Street in Collingwood.

And I was in grade six at the Christian Brothers.

She paid for the cigarettes and we split them.

So I took 10 cigarettes and she took the other 10.

So she didn't mind that I was smoking at the age of 11, which people might seem surprised by.