''I JUST happened to fall in love with a man who lived a different life to that of a lot of husbands. It is a world with rules for men and where women know their place,'' wrote the crime matriarch Judy Moran.
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And where was Moran's place? According to the Crown prosecutor, it was behind the wheel of the getaway car, speeding from the scene of the murder of her brother-in-law, Des ''Tuppence'' Moran.
Judy Moran is on trial in the Victorian Supreme Court over his murder in 2009. She has pleaded not guilty and says at the time of the shooting she was returning from visiting the grave of her son, Mark, who had been shot and killed on the same day - June 15 - nine years earlier.
The trial is the culmination of an extraordinary decade of gangland violence and murders, including the shooting deaths of her two sons, Mark and Jason; her former husband Lewis Moran; her first husband, Leslie Cole; and Carl Williams, the man found guilty of murdering, among others, Jason and Lewis Moran.
But long before the Underbelly series glamorised Melbourne's years-long bloodbath, there was Judy Moran, famous for her habit of carefully selecting outfits for her family's many court appearances, and for her love of a good blow-dry.
Determined to keep up appearances, she thanks no less than two hairdressers, one make-up artist, a clothing stylist and Miss Louise Shoes at the Hyatt on Collins in her 2005 autobiography, My Story.
During a childhood spent in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote - and for a time, Coolangatta in Queensland - Moran harboured a secret passion for dance.
At the tender age of 13, as she writes in her autobiography, she appeared on a children's television program, The Tarax Show, hoping to make a career in showbiz. It was not to be.
She married Leslie ''Johnny'' Cole at 18 - he went to work on the tough Melbourne docks, she worked weekends at her father's flower stall at Victoria Markets.
That marriage failed, and soon she had moved in with Lewis Moran.
''I knew early on in our relationship that Lewis didn't work nine to five,'' Judy Moran writes, with deliberate understatement. At first he was part of a pickpocket gang that targeted people at the races. Then it was SP bookmaking.
Yet for all her bottle-blonde bravado, Moran says Lewis's violence put her in hospital many times. It was not until she discovered he was having an affair with a long-time friend that she finally cracked.
Planning to kill him, she bought a mallet and had the words ''For Lewis'' engraved on the handle. Then she bought a machete. In the end, it was the so-called baby-faced killer, Carl Williams, who murdered Lewis, and Judy Moran got on with her life.
But, as the prosecution alleges, there was no love lost between Judy and her brother-in-law, who they say she plotted to kill. The jury was told a witness will testify that she not only drove the gunman to and from the shooting, but said to the gunman: ''Did you get him?'', to which he replied: ''Yeah, no worries, I got him.''
Her trial continues in Melbourne.
