Like most bloggers, I follow my daily stats religiously, and usually have a pretty good idea of who has been here and what they came looking for. Most visitors are just image searchers, but then there’s the Faithful Forty (my regular daily visitors), the occasional stumblers, people who find me through the other bloggers who are nice enough to link to me, and a small number of people looking for me in the vast sea of the Internet. There are also a few people who stop by looking for one of the other numerous Brian Kanes of the world (which once again reminds me that I should really revise and re-publish my “Many Faces of Brian Kane” page).
I thought I had a pretty good handle on the most common “other” Brians: Brian the jazz musician, Brian the astrophysicist, Brian the radio personality, Brian the artist (whom Bridget actually worked with for a while), Brian the furniture designer, and so on. There’s even a fictional private eye named Brian Kane. Then last week there was a surge of visitors all from Australia Googling for “Brian Kane” or “Les Kane” or both.
Turns out that the most famous Brian Kane in Australia is…or, more accurately, was…a notorious gangster. Brian Kane and his brother Leslie were a pair of thugs who were part of the underworld scene in Melbourne in the 1970s and were participants in a famous heist known as “The Great Bookie Robbery” . Les Kane was gunned down just a couple of years after the heist. His widow once referred to him as “The Most Violent Man In Australia”. Brian Kane was killed, apparently to prevent him from killing the man who killed Les, in a hotel lobby in 1982. By the following year, everyone who had been involved in the heist was dead. Here’s a picture of him:
All the Googling about Les & Brian Kane was in response to a mini-series that has been airing on the Australian television network Channel 9 called “Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities” about the gang war between the Kanes and gangster Ray Chuck’s men. From Channel 9′s website, it looks like there is still one episode left to go. You can watch a few clips here, but if you aren’t in Australia, you’ll have to snag the torrents to watch the whole thing.
And ladies, check out the handsome bastard who is playing me…er, that vicious monster Brian Kane…
Please, no drooling.
