The Gangster and his Moll!

I’m not going to lie there were times when I felt like I was living the dream, but those times were fleeting.  Most times I felt like I was in a living nightmare!

Wearing designer dresses and sparkling jewels, I may have been envied by the passing observer.  Beneath this affluent exterior was a girl screaming to get away, desperate to flee the abuse.  The finery he decked me out in was purely for stroking his own ego, after all he wanted to ensure he had the best looking handbag in the joint!

He was after all a much coveted High Roller!  Everyone from the wait staff in the finest restaurants at the Casino to the Concierge, the Croupiers, and the Pit Bosses courteously bowed and scraped before him and acknowledged his presence as if he were royalty.

I wondered were they behaving like the characters in the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Telling the Emperor his suit was the finest in the land when all along he was naked. Were they pretending that he was important when all along they knew he was really a bad man, a gangster?  It made my stomach churn, eventually I would come to dislike them for their subservience, for their obsequious behaviour of someone who was not worthy of such respect.

But here I was, trapped in five star luxury, dining on Lobster, drinking Krug Champagne and longing for my chance to escape!  Growing up I was told that crime does not pay, and yet, here I was living a life that totally contradicted that.  Weeks at a time holed up in the best suites money could buy at Jupiter’s Casino, dining on Beluga Caviar as though it were Hamburger mince.

Like a bird in a gilded cage all I longed for was freedom, a simple life, a life free from danger and violence.

The Gangster & Moll Ball at Jupiter’s Casino…how appropriate.  I won the best Moll!  I still have the prize a Crystal Gun and a Lalique Perfume Atomizer.