GANGS, guns & stilettos
The blue jewels in Deborah Wallace’s earrings are jiggling as she re-enacts her mother throwing a curtain rod, like a javelin, at a milk thief. The year was 1969 and mother-of-four Aileen Wallace had booby-trapped the verandah of their Western Sydney home to stop their milk delivery being snatched. When the thief was ensnared, she sprang to her feet and tore the curtain rod off the window.
“All I remember is she said, ‘He’s here!’ and I saw her running down the road in her cotton nightie,” Deb says, laughing. “She launched the rod at the offender like a spear, with the lace curtain still attached.”
The man fled but, Deb adds, “we never lost another bottle of milk!”
It may seem like an auspicious story from the childhood of the recently retired commander of NSW Police’s bikie taskforce, Strike Force Raptor, but the woman who came to be known as “the gangbuster” never planned on becoming a cop. “I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do – I was a pretty average student,” Deb says.
As a teen, she had a vague ambition to become a travel agent, and on the surface, the tall woman whose cobalt wrap matches her earrings and eyeshadow would seem perfectly suited to a role
