OLD man time — and the legacy of a hitman’s bullet — ravaged Bert Wrout’s body, but his defiant and cantankerous nature burned bright to the very end.

NEWS REPORT: Illness claims gangland veteran Bert Wrout who survived underworld hit

Despite knowing full well his gunpowder was fizzling as his lungs continued to deteriorate, Wrout refused to lie down until The Reaper forced his hand.

Via his crime blog, however, Wrout died with all guns blazing as he continued to fire shots across the bows of the lawyers, judicial officers and fellow underworld figures he despised.

In gangland parlance, there are many ways to describe death: people can be "knocked", "fall off the perch" or "cross the River Jordan".

If he could talk from the other side, Wrout, who died a wizened 73-year-old in hospital on Sunday, June 28, 2015, would most likely describe his passing in similar fashion.

"I'm brown bread now, son," is how he'd probably put it.

Before obstructive cardio-pulmonary disease finally killed him, Wrout was linked to a life support machine for about a year in his claustrophobic Housing Commission bedsit.

An oxygen tube connected him to the electronic box; its clear plastic tube like a synthetic umbilical cord providing life-sustaining O2 to his nostrils.

As Wrout put it, his lungs were “completely buggered”.

"I’m old and I’m dying," he declared, a husk of the former criminal identity he once was.

Wrout’s home was not much bigger than a prison cell.

It might as well have been one.

During a visit last year, his cramped unit doubled as a makeshift confessional as he openly discussed what he described as a life preordained.

It wasn't a history lesson; Melbourne’s gangland war was old news.

This was to be Wrout’s last face-to-face interview.

Bert Wrout on Bert Wrout before he died.

It was a hot, stifling day.

As we set up for the interview, Wrout pointed back into the adjoining kitchenette with a clawed right hand; his fingers were recently damaged, he said, by a bullet that accidentally fired from a gun he was cleaning in his unit.

“Coffee, tea, all up there,” he advised in grandfatherly fashion.

“Give us me Coke from down the bottom of the fridge, will ya. There’s lemonade for you blokes in the door.”

Wrout sat at his cluttered computer desk.

He spent a lot of time at that computer.

It provided a portal to the events of the outside world, and was the tool with which he transmitted and disseminated his vitriolic personal crime blogs.

Gone were the Marilyn Monroe and Laurel and Hardy posters from his walls.

He'd passed them off to a relative.

At the end of his single bed sat a TV with a range of DVDs stacked in a shelf above the flat screen.

Blade Runner

We Were Soldiers.

Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

Jerry Lee Lewis and Bob Dylan.

There was a stubby holder emblazoned with a bikie gang insignia — “The Mocking Birds”.

“We had to get permission to form that club through someone at the Hells Angels,” Wrout said.

“There’s about 10 or 12 of us in that club — all old-time crooks.”

THAT’S exactly what Herbert Wrout was.

An old-time crook.

And a character.

And he was proud of it; his life he said was preordained.

“I’ve got no regrets about anything, mate,” he said defiantly.

“Hey, times were once good. If I was sitting on 100,000 eggies (ecstasy tablets), I made f---ing sure 1000 or 2000 went my way.”

Ironically, it was his weathered history that saved him from an immediate jail term in November 2009 when he appeared in the County Court for breaching the terms of a suspended sentence.

Wrout’s barrister, Richard Backwell, told Judge Graeme Hicks: “The man before you today is but a shadow of his former self.”

A clinical psychologist wrote that Wrout had one of the most significant cases of post-traumatic stress disorder he'd seen.

Wrout made that County Court appearance five years after he died momentarily on the operating table the night a gunman shot and winged him.

That shooting happened at the Brunswick Club in Sydney Rd when two armed men came to kill his running mate Lewis Moran  — a miserable drug trafficker with shallow pockets and a hangdog face.

Unarmed, Wrout and Lewis were sitting ducks during Melbourne's gangland war.

Wrout wasn’t born with a gun in his hand but liked to keep one close by in his final years.

In the months before our interview, according to Wrout, two jacks from the local cop shop — a male sergeant and a junior female constable — had “raided” his unit looking for firearms.

They found an inoperable Luger handgun Wrout was painting.

“I told ‘em to take the bloody paint as well,” Wrout said with disdain.

Wrout talked in the colourful vernacular of an old-school bad guy, but one sensed he was not truly bad to the bone.

He wasn't a killer or a rapist or a stick-up merchant.

In his time he was Lewis Moran’s driver, and a co-accused drug trafficker.

He was known to carry his own gun, and act as a fence for others' firearms.

Wrout did time inside with Lewis.

Spent 10 months in jail on remand facing charges relating to an alleged $2 billion drug syndicate.

Before they were pinched and remanded in custody, Wrout and Lewis were close.

But according to Wrout their relationship soured when Lewis lagged to the "jacks" in an effort to get bail.

Lewis told the cops that Wrout was the boss.

“I knew Lewis. I’d been driving him around for 15 years,” Wrout explained, teeth bared.

“Lewis left me in the boob ... Don’t talk to me about Lewis Moran. He was a f---ing dog.”

Wrout neither forgot nor forgave Lewis Moran but, despite his hatred of the man, Wrout found himself standing by Lewis's side at the Brunswick Club the night the two gunmen came calling.

He argued “it” was all meant to be, saying his course had nothing to do with free choice or, God forbid, divine intervention.

“I wouldn’t change one thing,” Wrout said with a tone of finality.

"And let me tell you something - nothing can be changed. Nothing. It's preordained from when you're in your mother's womb."

BONNIE Wrout gave birth to Herbert Wrout in the grey Melbourne days of 1941.

It was the era of sly grog and starting-price bookmakers.

In 2012, Wrout co-authored a book called Kill the Morans with former newspaper reporter Brett Quine in which he recalled growing up as a boy in West Melbourne.

In the book he remembered watching the soldiers march home from World War II, how Chinese takeaway was a special treat and how "rat-infested" dumping grounds were his playgrounds.

During our interview in his stifling flat, Wrout confirmed he was "brought up religious".

"I was brought up a Catholic in West Melbourne, which was traditionally Catholic I suppose,” he said between laboured breaths.

Wrout attended St Mary’s Star of the Sea school in West Melbourne.

“(St Mary’s) was the church of Daniel Mannix, who was a great figure in Australian Catholicism ... that was his parish church while he waited to become an archbishop,” Wrout said of St Mary’s.

“So I thought I was religious.”

Some who knew Wrout suggested he had made choices as a young bloke.

Those choices?

With his high IQ, one was to accept a scholarship at a major university instead of falling in with low-lifes to make dirty money in the shadows after working jobs in sheet metal, the rag trade and book retail.

Sitting with Wrout last year, a solitary soul in virtual home detention, it was obvious which path he had chosen. 

In person, Wrout could spin a yarn as well as he could jot one down on paper.

He had his detractors.

Some people considered him a Chopper Read-type figure; a bloke who never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Others believed he'd oversold his standing on the underworld food chain.

In an email to this journalist, one pub drinker branded Wrout as nothing more than a glorified lunch boy for the Moran crew.

But Wrout dispelled his critics.

He possessed intimate knowledge about underworld events and often unloaded unkindly on the gangland players he knew.

He did not tolerate fools, and had no time for people who, in his eyes, patronised him.

At one point during our video interview his breathing, again, became quite laboured and I asked if he needed another soft drink.

“Don’t f---ing patronise me,” he warned.

I explained we didn't want him dying on camera, and his eyes lit up with the prospect of a quick one-liner.

“Hey what a scoop you’ll have then,” he suggested, a rictus grin carved into his face.

“That will win you a Walkley.”

TO be a criminal in the ‘40s and ‘50s you had to belong to a certain milieu.

While Wrout may have grown up around post Depression-era gangsters — he mentioned Jack Twist as one — he first came across the Morans at the Pastoral Hotel.

The Pastoral was a haunt for members and supporters of the then mighty Painters & Dockers Union.

“Les Kane used to be the SP bookmaker there. Brian Kane used to have a drink there,” he recalled.

"It's there that I came across Lewis."

Wrout became a trusted cog in the Moran crime machine.

Lewis, a miserly sadist, was into all sorts of crime — standover, bashings, guns and drugs.

He tortured his stepson Mark, Wrout said.

Turned the kid into an attack dog.

Mark had “dash” and was the real “heavy” of the clan, Wrout recalled.

“I loved Mark.”

Jason Moran, son of Lewis and Moonee Ponds matriarch Judy Moran, was a volatile “lunatic”, according to Wrout.

Wrout had a front-row seat as rival drug boss Carl Williams decimated the Moran family and its allies during Melbourne’s gangland war, which raged between 1998 and 2006.

As history shows, Lewis's close friend and ally Graham "The Munster" Kinniburgh was gunned down on December 13, 2003.

Half brothers Mark and Jason Moran were already gone by then: statistics on the gangland scoreboard.

Despite popular belief, Wrout was adamant Williams had nothing to do with Mark’s murder.

He reckoned Lewis signed Mark’s death warrant by falsely blaming Mark for information finding its way to the cops; information Lewis had, in fact, provided.

“When The Munster got shot dead I wasn’t talking to Lewis,” Wrout recalled.

“We’d blued ‘cos when we got out of jail (on bail for the major drug charges) I realised Lewis had given me up. He lagged me in as being the drug kingpin.

“When The Munster died Lewis turned up and was really f---ing crying. He said, ‘I’ve got no one left. Will you come back?’ I said, ‘Oh, f--- ya. Okay'.

“I’ve got me own principles. Very, very strong principles. But I knew I was a f---ing walking target after that.”

Wrout literally became that target on the night of March 31, 2004, after he and Lewis reconciled.

They were drinking six-ounce glasses at the Brunswick Club when the two gunmen — on Carl Williams’ books — arrived to knock Lewis.

One of the shooters put two into Lewis’s head as he cowered near the poker machines.

Wrout, meanwhile, had his own issues by the bar.

He told the bloke with raised handgun to "get f---ed".

The balaclava-clad gunman let a couple go.

At least one projectile hit its mark.

When Wrout was shot the projectile pin-balled inside his body.

It drilled through major organs.

With his left arm hanging by threads and suffering massive internal injuries, Wrout tried his best to duck and weave as the gunmen let more zingers go.

The projectiles missed their target.

Wrout slumped to the carpet and both gunmen fled.

He was rushed to hospital and died on the operating table, but came back.

Wrout’s “white light” experience got him thinking — is there a heaven and a hell?

“That made me question things,” he said.

“In hospital, the ‘bag of yeast’ (the priest) came around. I said to him, ‘Can I talk to you? I wanna talk to you about this — I seen the tunnel and I seen these figures.’

“And do you know what? He wasn’t the slightest bit interested. That actually disappointed me so much, and that probably turned me against religion again.”

More recently, Wrout was moved from his cell-like flat to the more comfortable confines of a coastal nursing home out of Melbourne.

The surrounds offered him some comfort as his lungs continued to burn and collapse inside his skeletal chest. 

Some might say he didn't deserve any home comforts at all, having led the existence he did - preordained, by choice or as a result of circumstance.

His family begged to differ. Compassion for loved ones remains eternal, no matter the sort of life they may have lived along the way. 

Wrout's sense of humour outlived his body.

He often joked about the quality of food he received at the nursing home; it was a feast when compared to the staples he survived on back in his Moonee Ponds flat.

"Bloody prawns, crayfish topped with caviar etc," he emailed recently, tongue in cheek.

"I am allergic so will settle for fillet steak from some farm down here. The girls say you can eat it with a fork!"

Wrout's body shut down as he lay in hospital. At least he didn't die on the Brunswick Club floor next to his dead "mate" Lewis Moran 11 years earlier.

In the end, Wrout found religion once more before dying peacefully asleep in his hospital bed.

He had also spoken with a priest and embraced prayer before his final days.

Having lived a hard-knock life as a Melbourne gangland identity, Bert Wrout now knows whether there's any point to religion.

If there is, in fact, a heaven and a hell.  

Or a long cold sleep, as nature takes its course.