Coke Train Craig: The Innercity Police Cunstable from Bondi
Craig Dennehy wasn’t born a cunstable. That sort of thing happens to you when you’re a third-generation Bondi ratbag with a broken collarbone, a glittering coke habit, and an ego big enough to surf on.
He wore mirrored Oakleys in the rain. Carried a truncheon like it was Excalibur. Called himself “the last clean pig in Sydney” while his nose bled at barbecues and his mum lied to the neighbours about “sinus issues”.
Craig got the nickname Coke Train in his academy days, not for his consumption—though he put half of Surry Hills’ nightlife up his nostrils—but for the way he could snort a line with such velocity it sounded like a locomotive derailing through a bathroom stall.
By thirty-four, he’d been suspended five times for “aggressive policing” (which included dropkicking a Year 9 truancy suspect through the window of a Red Rooster), framed a rival officer with a planted kilo of talcum powder (“it looked real from a distance”), and had a tattoo of Ned Kelly on his left calf that said “ARMED WIF FAKTS”.
But somehow, somehow, Craig kept getting reinstated. His sergeant reckoned he was “good for morale” which in NSW Police terms meant he got shit done, regardless of how illegal, immoral, or chemically unstable he was at the time.
Everything changed the day he met Gina, a 27-year-old barista from Marrickville with one eyebrow ring and an entire suitcase full of red flags. She was perfect. And absolutely terrifying. She chain-smoked in her sleep and told Craig she once killed a man in Goa with a flip-flop.
Love at first sight. Or stroke. Or punch. Hard to say. They spent the first week of their relationship in a ketamine-induced coma in an Airbnb above a kebab shop in Kings Cross.
Craig called in sick. Claimed gastro. His boss knew it was bullshit, but he also knew Craig once tasered a bikie so hard he lost a testicle. Best not to push it.
Things escalated from wild to apocalyptic when Gina introduced Craig to her cousin Trevor, a “pharmaceutical entrepreneur” with one tooth, three burner phones, and an uncanny resemblance to a bin chicken.
Trevor had a plan. Craig had a badge. Gina had nothing to lose.
And that’s how “Operation Thunderfist” began—an off-the-books, entirely illegal, very stupid scheme involving 12 kilos of pure Colombian snow, a modified GoGet van, and a stuffed meerkat named Wazza filled with meth.
For four nights straight, Craig was the conductor of the Coke Train, snorting his way through every sleepless suburb between Bondi and Blacktown. He arrested people just for looking tired. Punched a Santa at Westfield. Tried to commandeer a ferry yelling “Maritime law means nothing to me!”
Meanwhile, Trevor kept misplacing the drugs. One batch ended up in a child’s birthday piñata. Another got baked into a vegan banana loaf sold at a Marrickville market stall called Suck My Plant. Things spiralled.
But it wasn’t the drugs that brought Craig down. Nor the illegal weapons, the unpaid tolls, or the dozen dogs he’d accidentally adopted in a speed-fuelled moment of compassion.
It was a magpie.
A bin near Central Station. 4:42am. Craig, shirtless, ranting about the Illuminati, tried to intimidate a magpie off a half-eaten cheeseburger. Bird wasn’t having it. Pecked his eye. He screamed. Tripped. Hit his head on the corner of a bin marked “Recycle Soft Plastics Only”.
Dead on the spot.
In his hand, a half-written resignation letter that simply read: I am become vibe, destroyer of worlds.
They buried him in his uniform. Oakleys on. Truncheon clutched tight. Someone left a little baggie in the coffin, just in case he got bored in the afterlife.
Gina shagged the priest. Trevor became mayor of Campbelltown.
The Coke Train never stopped. It just changed conductors.