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Women That Left Their Mark Throughout History

Khalid Elhassan August 4, 2020 34 min

34. The Sly-Grog Queen

Kate Leigh, the Sly-Grog Queen. Justice and Police Museum

The expansion of Tilly Devine’s criminal enterprises brought her into conflict with Kate Leigh, an Australian-born crime boss specializing in unlicensed bars, drugs, and with her own line in the prostitution racket. Known as the Sly-Grog Queen, Leigh was just as violent as Devine, but shrewder: she was seldom convicted for the violence she ordered or personally dished out.

The rivalry between Leigh and Devine grew into personal enmity, which flared into the Razor Wars. The crime queens’ henchmen would attack each other on the streets, raid and trash each other’s brothels, bars, and stash houses, and tattle on each other to the police. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the sight of slashed bodies and blood splatters on Sydney’s streets became all too routine.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.