Raid of The Drug Barons
The Pub at Mintabie The battle of the "Drug Barons" was being planned in the Mintabie Pub one night over a game of Snooker. Blacky and Giovani would play a couple of shots then stop for some intense conversation, play a bit more, then some more talking. Eventually they left the pub and drove off in Blacky's battered and hand-painted Hilux. I didn’t hear about the battle until the phone rang at about 2 am. It was Ruffy, the Clinic nurse, asking me to light the airstrip flares for the Flying Doctor plane. Apparently he had to fly Giovani, one of "The Drug Barons" out to hospital in Adelaide. I dragged "The Kid" out of bed and we drove up to the airstrip, filled all the pots with diesel, then went along and lit them all. We had just finished when we could see the RFDS plane circling the Airstrip. As it landed Ruffy drove up in the Clinic ambulance with Giovani on a stretcher. The plane taxied to the apron where we were all waiting. The doctor and nurse climbed out to check on the patient. It was the first time I had seen him since he left the pub. He wasn’t a pretty bloke at his best but now he looked very ordinary. All the front of his face had been caved in and his nose was flattened completely. You could have run a string line from his forehead to his chin and it would have cleared his nose by half an inch. Anyway we loaded him onto the plane and went back to bed. In the morning I was dragged out of bed again. This time it was to look for Blacky. He had gone missing during the night and the rumour was that he and Giovani had been in a fight and Blacky was badly injured. We were able to piece together the whole story when Max turned up. Max had the store in Mintabie and was woken late at night by a well known drug dealer who desperately wanted petrol so that he could leave town in a hurry. Apparently "The Drug Barons", Giovani and Blacky had heard that Sweetman, the drug dealer in question, had sold a fair bit of marijuana and was cashed up. They thought they might go around in the middle of the night, tie him up and torture him until he told them where the money and the remainder of the drugs were. They would then take over his business and run him out of town. Apparently "The Drug Barons" hadn’t planned to be quite as drunk as they were when they carried out the raid. Sweetman was woken up when Blacky, driving without lights, put the Hilux up on a big stump and made a terrible lot of noise trying to reverse off it. Sweetman, wide awake by now, watched as they half sneaked, half stumbled towards his camp from the abandoned Hilux. He heard Blacky say, “You go in through the window, and I’ll go in through the door. Ready, set, Go!” Sweetman told Max that Blacky couldn’t get the door open at first because he was trying to crash it inwards. The door didn’t lock anyway and he only had to turn the handle and open it outwards! In the meantime Giovani was trying to quietly remove the louvre panes from the windows. Eventually Giovani burst into the camp just as Blacky worked out how to open the door and came in as well. They must have been a bit confused because Sweetman said they started belting into each other, so he just hit them with his baseball bat every now and then until they were both unconscious. That was when he panicked, decided to leave town and woke Max for the petrol. Blacky eventually turned up at the clinic after hiding in the bush for two days. He was flown to Adelaide where the doctors put a titanium plate in his head. No one could tell whether he had suffered brain damage or not.
Blasting caprock to reach the softer opal bearing sandstone, Mintabie
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