Deadline: Forget tobacco, another perfectly legal drug is shaking up Victoria’s black market

Victoria seems to be the type of state where legal substances can become even more valuable than illegal ones on the black market.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

Fat profits

Fake tan, Botox and liposuction have long been options for Range Rover-set members who want to look their best.

Now, our sources tell us that black market Ozempic sold by drug dealers is the latest go-to for some of Melbourne’s in-crowd.

The massively popular weight-loss drug is very hard to get hold of if you are the average Joe or Josephine.

It generally requires a diabetes diagnosis and we’ve been told that, because of scarcity, pharmacists often refuse to dispense it for those who want to drop kilos, even if they have a prescription.

One near-iron clad rule of economics is that wherever there’s a shortage, there’ll almost always be a criminal.

It’s unclear where they get it but one well-placed Deadline snout tells us that there is a supply line among those who also sell cocaine and ecstasy.

Our man says those making the sales are not missing their opportunity.

He says those dealers selling genuine Ozempic, not the bootleg versions also available, are charging well over double the official pharmacist price.

Of course, price might not be a massive issue for the more portly among the Toorak Rd and Brighton set. But the rise in this new trade does pose one obvious question: where are the traffickers getting it?

Off-brand bootleg Ozempic is all the rage with Melbourne’s in-crowd. Picture: Supplied

Not so quiet men

We note that the Irish-themed Quiet Man Hotel in Flemington closed down on St Patrick’s Day.

The landmark Racecourse Rd venue is expected to reopen later in the year under new owners with another Emerald Isle-style makeover.

Those with long memories of the area will recall the Quiet Man was, decades ago, known as the Palace Hotel. That was back when the grandest pub on the block was the Doutta Galla, later renamed the Sydney Liars Club.

The Palace of old was not always a welcoming place where you’d be settling in for a pint of Guinness to make new friends.

Back then, it was a pretty tough joint, in line with some other pubs in the area which have been tidied up over many years — notably Hardimans in Kensington’s main street, and a scary venue known as the Bayview, which didn’t bother much with replacing broken windows in the 1980s, and was known as the venue where police wouldn’t venture without back up.

The Palace, and likewise Hardimans, was something of a home base for members of the Flemington Crew.

They were a group involved in some big bank armed robberies of the 1980s and implicated in the Walsh St police killings after one of their crew, Graeme Jensen, was shot dead by armed robbery detectives at Narre Warren in 1988.

In those days, anyone who turned up at the Palace looking for “good craic” might have left in an ambulance.

Bit of an Irish insult to close on St Paddy’s day isn’t it? Picture: William West

Whole lotta rosie horse@$^!

A major misunderstanding can sometimes be a good thing.

Many of us woke to the terrible news on Thursday that Rosie the therapy horse had been stolen from Axedale, near Bendigo.

Who the hell could steal an animal which had helped more than 100 children with disabilities live a better life?

The black and white gypsy cob mare, a Victoria Police media release said, had been towed away in a horse trailer some time on Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Apart from her community good deeds, Rosie was worth $40,000.

Well, later in the morning, a notification was received that a press conference on the investigation would not be going ahead.

“Investigators have located the horse and further information has come to light revealing it had not been stolen. This is no longer a police incident,” it stated.

Case closed.

Police were “saddled up” for an investigation before Rosie was located. Sourced: Axedalestables

Revealed: The Benalla beer heist

Old-school police were pretty good at handling young offenders their own way. That’s the way it went with the Great Benalla Beer Heist of the early 1960s.

A certain Benalla High student took a daily shortcut to school through the railway yards. One morning he saw a lone freight car with a loose tarpaulin cover. Underneath the ‘tarp’ was several tonnes of bottled Victoria Bitter.

When the alert student shared this intelligence with his mate Graeme “Dexter” Duro and their apprentice panel beater mate “Jacko” Jackson, they came up with a cunning plan to liberate some of this abandoned beer from the iron horse.

Jacko had an old Austin A30 ute, an essential part of the heist conspiracy.

After midnight that night, Jacko pulled the ute alongside the railway shed not far from the beer-laden railway wagon. The trio pilfered 25 slabs of VB and drove the overloaded ute to an old mineshaft known as Reef Hills and stashed it.

It was (almost) party time. Apprentices from Trade School plus senior High School kids were in on the “secret” to meet up that Friday night at the old mine site.

Sadly, says our source, the secrecy was “as flimsy as a Boris Johnson excuse,” and party goers congregating at the pick up point in town were greeted by the grim faces of the school principal and a posse of teachers.

It turned out some nervous mums had rang the school to enquire what time the “school party at the Reef Hills” finished, and asking if it would be well supervised.

Sgt “Buffalo” of Benalla police got wind of the beer heist and called the railway station master. Our three heroes were bundled into the police station and the jig was up.

Luckily for the trio, says our source, “Dexter” Duro was a champion footballer, at 16 the youngest player in the Ovens and Murray Football league. Luckily, the police sergeant was a footy club heavyweight and he made sure the grog was returned to the rail truck and no more was said.

The beer conspirator “Dexter” Duro, who captained Benalla at the age of 19, went on to play two seasons with St Kilda seconds. He also joined the police force but later became ordained a Catholic priest and was forgiven his teenage sins.

If he’d been prosecuted and gone to a boys’ home back then, it might not have ended so well for the teen footy star turned copper turned priest.

We can’t ask him what he thinks now because Father Graeme Stuart Duro went to his heavenly reward in 2019.

All bronzed-up

A media appearance by a dogged investigator had those who know him well marvelling at his tanned visage.

There were comparisons with Donald Trump after he recently turned up on their tellies looking as brown as a berry.