The legend of Kate Leigh, Sydney’s famed brothel madam, sly grog seller and drug dealer, has loomed large in every account of Sydney’s criminal history from the 1920s to the 1960s. But she has never had a biography of her own. Novelist and historian Leigh Straw teases out the full story of how this wayward Reformatory girl made a fortune in eastern Sydney and became a leading underworld figure.