Barry Michael, Alphonse Gangitano and the night at Lazar's

The world super featherweight champion was lying on his back on a nightclub couch on King Street, and the men holding him down were trying to take his face off.

It was 1987, and Barry Michael was still the champion of the world. He was in Lazar's, one of the busiest clubs in Melbourne, on a night out. Within a few minutes his nose was smashed across his face and a man was biting at his cheek. The man, by Michael's account, was Alphonse Gangitano, the Black Prince of Lygon Street. Somewhere in the room, if you believe him, was Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read.

Michael is not sure that you should. Neither, in the end, is anybody else.

death in their eyes

Barry Michael, on the men around him at Lazar's

Barry Michael was born Barry Michael Swettenham in Watford, Hertfordshire, on 2 June 1955. His family emigrated to Australia when he was two, and he is said to have grown up in Williamstown, on the western side of Melbourne.

He fought sixty times as a professional. On 12 July 1985 he beat Lester Ellis, the young Melbourne favourite, and took the IBF super featherweight title. It was the kind of fight that splits a city. Ellis was younger and the crowd's darling, and Michael was the older man from the west who had spoiled the party.

In October that year he defended the title against the Korean Jin-Shik Choi at the Darwin Oval and stopped him in four. He held the belt for two years.

King Street in the late 1980s was the nightlife strip of the Melbourne CBD. It was also a place where the underworld drank. Lazar's was the best known of its clubs.

The story of what happened there comes mostly from Michael himself, in interviews he has given over the years, and in the film he sat down for. It goes like this.

He was in the club with his wife and a friend. His wife started screaming. His friend was being carried out unconscious by bouncers. When Michael turned round, he says, he was surrounded by men with "death in their eyes", and he knew they carried pistols. He accused Gangitano of setting him up. Gangitano went for him.

Michael went down on a couch. He says he was beaten there while he was held, that his nose was broken across his face, and that he believes Gangitano latched on to his cheek with his teeth and tried to bite it off. A glass ashtray was used on his face. In the end, he says, one of the bouncers sat on him and told the others he had had enough, and that if they went on they would kill him.

Four months later, on 9 August 1987, Michael lost his title to the American Rocky Lockridge. It was the last fight of his career.

Nobody was ever convicted over the night at Lazar's, and the reason for it has never been settled in a court.

Michael has offered two. There had been an earlier clash between his people and Gangitano's in another club, which left bad blood. And there was Lester Ellis. Michael had beaten the city's favourite fighter and there was money in a rematch, money that was never going to arrive while Michael held the belt and refused to play along. Mick Gatto, who knew Gangitano better than most, has said in his book that the attack came not long after Michael beat Ellis. Gatto says Gangitano tried to bite off Michael's nose.

That leaves the third man.

Mark Brandon Read later claimed he was in Lazar's that night. He has been quoted as saying a glass ashtray was used on Michael. He was reported to have said afterwards that Michael would never walk and talk again.

Michael does not remember seeing him. Years later he said he believed Read had been there, and might have been involved with the ashtray, but that he could not be sure of the details. A man being held down on a couch and beaten does not keep a list of who is in the room.

The trouble with Read as a witness is the same trouble every crime reporter in Melbourne had with him. He wrote a shelf of books, and he never let a dull truth spoil a good chapter. What makes the claim odd is not that Read might have exaggerated. It is that Read and Gangitano were supposed to hate each other.

The feud went back to the 1970s, and almost everything we know about it comes from Read.

Read was a few years older than Gangitano. By his own account, he had given the younger man his first shotgun. Then, as Read told it, he came out of jail and let it be known that he was going to belt a well-known street fighter, a man Gangitano happened to admire. Soon afterwards Read was in a nightclub toilet when the cubicle door came in, and Gangitano and his friends started kicking him in the face.

Read's version has a detail that only Read would have included. He said he got away by smearing his own faeces into Gangitano's face. Then he came out swinging at the bouncers, and Gangitano was gone.

He did not forget it. Read said that he got hold of gelignite and handguns and started shooting up places Gangitano had an interest in. He told a story of Gangitano going out through the toilet window of a gambling club, landing on the roof of a car and hurting his back, then going to Mick Gatto to complain that Read wanted to blow his head off. Read also claimed, as he claimed about most men who annoyed him, that Gangitano was a major heroin dealer, which was the kind of man Read said he hunted.

Read was back in prison for much of the 1980s, and Gangitano, by Read's account, came back out of hiding every time the gates shut behind him. By 1986, when Read was out again, the two men seem to have come to some kind of peace. That is the only way Read could have been standing beside Gangitano at Lazar's a year later, and it is the only reason anybody bothers to argue about it.

So there are two possibilities. Either Read was in the club, and the most famous feud in the Melbourne underworld had been patched up long enough for the two men to beat a world champion together. Or Read was not there, and he put himself in the room because it made a better story. Michael, the one man who knows what the room looked like from the couch, has never been able to say for certain.

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Neither man got the ending he wrote for himself.

Gangitano was shot dead in the laundry of his house in Templestowe in January 1998. It was not Read's doing. A coroner later found that two men from inside Gangitano's own circle had been in the house that night. Nobody has ever been charged.

Read was released in 1998 and went on to fame, books, stage shows and a feature film about his life. He died of liver cancer in the Royal Melbourne Hospital on 9 October 2013, aged fifty-eight.

Barry Michael never boxed again after Lockridge. He went into the media, as a boxing analyst on radio and a writer for the Herald Sun, and he is still talking about the night at Lazar's nearly forty years later. He has never been able to say for certain who all the men on top of him were.

Barry Michael tells it in his own words in our film on Gangland, along with the full story of the feud between the Black Prince and Chopper Read.