Chopper Unchopped (143 page)

NORTHERN IRELAND, 1925. Five Irish patriots and gunmen stood by the River Quoile in County Down. “So it’s come, we are to say goodbye,” said Eamon De Valera sadly. “Kalan to America, Regan to Australia. And what of you, Eoin? Is it a Yankee or an Aussie you’ll be?”

Eoin Featherstone smiled. “I’m thinking it’s Australia, Eamon,” and he gave Regan a hearty pat on the shoulder.

“And what of you, Padraic?” said De Valera.

O’Shaughnessy spoke. “Well, Eamon. I’m like the others. I’ve relations in Australia as well as America, but I’ve first cousins in Melbourne and only second and third cousins in New York, so I reckon Aussie it will be.”

De Valera’s eyes were suspiciously moist as he took each man’s hand to shake it. “I’ll never have closer comrades than the men I’m standing with right now, here today, and that’s the God’s honest truth. But it’s sure you’ll have to leave, the black and tans are smashing the heads of Irish babies against walls over that traitor O’Higgins. You’ll have to go, lads, there is nothing else for it, because the provisionals want you dead. I can’t protect you without betraying my own role in the whole affair but vanish and I’ll smooth it all inside a year. We can either blame the loyalists or the Jesuits,” he said with a laugh.

“All this fuss over a traitor,” said Regan Reeves. “I don’t understand it.”

De Valera shook his head. “Yes, it’s my fault. We should have killed him in 1922, but we left it all a bit too late. We let him get too damn powerful. I blame myself.”

He paused, then said softly, “Well me darlins, it’s time to go.”

De Valera embraced each man, but when he came to Regan Reeves he had tears rolling down his cheeks. “As me old Spanish father used to say,” said De Valera to Reeves, “Adios Amigo, Adios Amigo.” And with that the four men walked away, leaving De Valera standing by the riverside.

“Adios Amigo,” whispered Regan Reeves under his breath, turning for one last wave goodbye. As Reeves walked away he wondered what fate would finally befall the magician of Irish blood and politics, Eamon De Valera. Then he wondered what the future would bring, half a world away.

THE longest journey starts with the shortest step. The four gunmen whose use-by date had come made their way first to Belfast. From there they took a boat to Plymouth, then went their separate ways.

Kalan Reeves took a ship to San Francisco. Regan Reeves, Eoin Featherstone and Padraic O’Shaughnessy took one to Sydney, then a train to Melbourne. They were met at Spencer Street railway station by Regan’s first cousin, Johnny Reeves, in his 1923 Renault Coupe De Ville.

Lucky for all concerned, Reeves had brought with him Grady Phillips, his personal right hand man and bodyguard. It was also lucky that Grady drove a 1924 Buick, so while Regan Reeves rode with Johnny in the Renault Coupe, Featherstone and O’Shaughnessy rode with Phillips in the Buick. It didn’t take the two-car convoy long to get to Collingwood, then to Gold Street and the Leinster Arms Hotel.

The five men got out and walked into the main bar and, you don’t have to be told, ordered a drink. Five pots of Carlton Draught Beer and five double Irish whiskeys, to be precise. It was something of an occasion, and they weren’t going to let it pass unmarked without a little drink.

“A toast,” said Regan Reeves, “to Ireland and the greatest Irishman alive, Eamon De Valera.” Everyone drank up and Johnny Reeves ordered a second round of drinks.

Squizzy Taylor had just been shot dead by Snowy Cutmore. Cutmore died on the spot. Taylor made it to hospital and died there, but he still had a few admirers among the hard men of Collingwood and nearby parts.

“A toast,” said Johnny Reeves, “to Collingwood and the second greatest Irishman who ever lived in this country. The first being Ned Kelly. I’m talking about Joseph Leslie Taylor. God rest ya soul, Squizzy.”

To Regan, Eoin and Padraic’s surprise every man in the bar raised their glass in salute and said “Hear, hear Squizzy Taylor” and everyone drank up.

After Johnny ordered yet another round of beer and Irish whiskey he settled down to talk to the first cousin he’d never seen before and his two Irish mates.

“Well boys, it’s simple,” he said. “I run Collingwood. The sly grog shops, the two-up schools, the SP bookies and the brothels. I’ll give each man a handgun and two boxes of shells. I’ve got an empty two bedroom house in Forrest Street that Eoin and Padraic can live in. It’s fully furnished of course, and there’s a 1922 Oldsmobile Roadster they can use. Regan, you can stay with me at my place in Easey Street. Every man gets a pound a day in wages. Seven quid a week. All ya got to do is back me up and pull the trigger when ya told to.”

The three Irishmen nearly fell over. A house, a car, a gun each and the stupendous payment of a pound a day. After years of poverty and danger they could hardly believe their luck. You could feed a family of 12 in Ireland on a pound a month, if you were lucky enough to get a pound a month, and here they were on that much a DAY. This Johnny Reeves must indeed be a top man in his field.

IN 1933 a three-year-old named Hall Mark won the Melbourne Cup. It paid four to one and Johnny Reeves had a thousand pounds on it. So, while the rest of the nation starved, Johnny Reeves and his crew got richer.

Johnny had made his first fortune in 1919. He had returned from the first world war broken and shattered, but was recruited by Squizzy Taylor. In six months Reeves was as right as rain. It was Taylor who paid for Johnny’s trip to America and on the 4th of July, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio, Johnny Reeves sat ringside and watched the great Jack Dempsey knock the Giant Cowboy Jess Willard down seven times in the first round and then knock him out in the third. A $US2000 bet on Dempsey at 10–1, as Willard was favourite to win, returned a tidy $20,000.

Squizzy Taylor was involved in shipping Scotch whisky, or at least something very like it, from Melbourne to New York, where the New York Irish gangs were fighting a bloody whisky war with the dagos. New York’s lower east side Irish could nearly all name a first, second or third cousin in Australia. The great famine of Ireland had torn the Irish population apart and scattered the survivors all over the world.

Johnny Reeves was escorted to the fight by Gun Boat MacGreevy and his gang, a drunken, gun-toting collection of Featherstones, O’Shaughnessys, Dohertys, O’Donnells and Donovans. Needless to say, Squizzy Taylor was delighted at the Dempsey victory, having cleaned up with Melbourne bookmakers, who’d all been predicting a Willard victory.

A year later Taylor won a 20,000 pound bet on a horse named Poitrel, a 6-year-old that paid 8-1 in the Melbourne Cup. Squizzy was lashed on the bet and it was then that Johnny Reeves had to earn his keep. He cut the SP bookie into 30 bits with a meat axe and fed him to pigs on a small farm in Epping, a chore that repaid Squizzy for the trip to America. They had gamey bacon for a month.

Of course, by 1933, as Johnny Reeves and his gang stood in the bar of the Leinster Arms Hotel in Gold Street, Collingwood, all that was history. There were, by this time, more pressing matters to attend to. “Them turds from Harper Street reckon they can snub their nose at ya, Johnny,” growled Busy O’Brien. “Their molls don’t pay no rent, there’s no sling our way. They started a two-up game in Langridge street and they got an SP bookie running in the Terminus in Victoria Street. The whole Abbotsford crew gotta be pulled up or Collingwood will split up. It sets a bad example Johnny. I’m tellin’ ya mate, we gotta jump on ’em. Bloody hell.”

Busy O’Brien was Johnny Reeves’s tactical adviser, so to speak. Busy was a short, thickset little man with a bald head and a broken nose and cauliflower ears from his time as the lightweight boxing champion of Victoria. He carried an ugly scar on the left side of his face, the reminder of a German bayonet on the western front. He had come back from France having been gassed seven times and shot once through the chest, with nothing but his Military Medal in his pocket and a few other assorted medals, including a couple from the French. He kept the Military Medal and sold the rest for ten bob the lot. He drank the whole ten bob in two days. So much for the “war to end all wars” that the politicians talked about.

Johnny Reeves had picked his old mate up out of the gutter and Busy O’Brien repaid Johnny with total and devoted loyalty. They called him Busy because he talked a lot and rushed to and fro, always in a hurry, always with a hundred things to do and not enough time to do ’em in. His regular reply to any greeting was, “Not now, I’m busy. Piss off, I’m busy.” Hence the nickname. “Piss Off O’Brien” just didn’t sound right.

Johnny stood in silence. Regan Reeves broke in. “Busy’s right, Roy.” Regan had taken to calling Johnny Roy the Boy much to Johnny’s comic relief. “He’s bloody well right. Let Eoin, Padraic and me look after this bit of business for ya, please, Roy. It would be an honour.”

The three runaway Irishmen were now earning three quid a day each. Twenty one pound a week was a fortune. Each man was sending thirty pound a month back to his family in North Dublin city. The Reeves, Featherstone and O’Shaughnessy clans back in Dublin had all been saved from poverty by the Collingwood money sent home, and it was all thanks to Johnny “Roy the Boy” Reeves. It was no great surprise that Regan wanted to kill anyone who dared to take the food from Johnny’s table because Regan was eating from the same table. Johnny nodded. “Yeah, all right Reig. You take care of Abbotsford for me.”

Regan Reeves smiled. He knew what Johnny meant.

OWEN Lewis and his two halfwit brothers Evan and Billy lived in a small three-bedroom bluestone cottage in Harper Street, Abbotsford. The Lewis brothers were the sons of a Welsh coalminer who had arrived in Australia in 1908, the same year Jack Johnson fought Tommy Burns and took the world heavyweight title from him at Rushcutters Bay in Sydney.

The Lewis family lived in Balmain until 1920, then moved to Victoria and bought the little house in Harper Street. Squizzy Taylor had once invited the Lewis boys to join the Collingwood push. The Lewis boys were all big, thickset, hard, fighting thugs of men. Not the sharpest tools in the shed, but they got the job done. Having grown up in Sydney they came to Melbourne with a real nose-in-the-air, smartarse attitude. And, being Welsh, it so happened they were Protestants. Reason enough, thought Regan, to kill ’em all. Ha ha.

But the Lewis boys weren’t exactly the nervous type. In fact, they showed a most disrespectful attitude. “Piss on Johnny Reeves,” Owen Lewis was heard to say. And his two semiretarded brothers would giggle as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. It was before television.

Owen was sitting in a big over-stuffed lounge chair. Evan and Billy sat on the couch. Fran Kinsella danced in the middle of the lounge room floor to the music of Jelly Roll Morton on the gramophone in the corner of the room. Fran loved jazz. In fact, if the truth were known, she loved dancing at the Peppermint lounge in Smith Street, but Johnny Reeves and his crew drank there and that meant the joint was out of bounds for Fran. She liked Johnny, but her boyfriend Owen Lewis was a violent, drunken thug and she had received too many beatings to publicly disobey him.

Fran was thin, small and sexy. She had been a prostitute, but being Owen Lewis’s girlfriend paid better.

“I reckon Johnny Reeves will shit himself,” grunted Billy Lewis.

“We own Abbotsford. If he comes over this side of Hoddle Street, he’ll get himself killed.”

“Fran, don’t dance like that in front of the boys,” Owen said sulkily. “You’re a little teaser.”

Fran stopped and took the record off and said, “Johnny Reeves is Collingwood and Abbotsford is part of Collingwood. Have you considered all this properly, Owen?”

He stood up and hit her. She hit the floor. With a smashed nose and a split top lip and three of her front teeth down her neck. She struggled and shook, choking on her own blood.

Owen screamed, “Don’t question me, moll! Ya smartarse mick whore.” He kicked her in the ribs and the fallen woman vomited, then passed out.

“Low smartarse tart,” said Evan. “Ya should never have taken her on in the first place.”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “She belongs in a whore house.”

Owen glared down at Fran and snarled, “Yeah, well, she’s going back where I got her from. The bloody street. Toss the slut out the front door.”

BUSY O’Brien woke up with a start and looked at his big old alarm clock ticking beside his bed.

“Holy hell,” he muttered. He couldn’t see a thing. He fumbled for a match and lit the candle. He didn’t have electric light. After doing it hard in the trenches, Busy didn’t mind little inconveniences like that. But he didn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night.

It was 4.30 am. The banging on his front door came again. Busy grabbed his .38 revolver and put on his slippers and dressing gown. He didn’t feel dressed without them. Candle in one hand and gun in the other, he went down the dark hallway.

“Who is it?” he called out. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Busy. Les Pepper. Open up.”

“Shit,” said Busy as he tried to open the door, juggling the candle and the .38 as he turned the handle.

When he managed to open the door he held the candle out in front of him. In the flickering yellow light he could see Les Pepper wasn’t alone. He was holding a battered and bleeding woman. She was barely conscious.

“What the hell is this nonsense, Les?” Busy asked. His time in the trenches had made him pretty hard to shock in the blood and guts business, but he was a bit vexed about being woken up.

Pepper walked into the hallway and dragged the half-dead woman with him. Busy closed the door and said, “Into the parlour. The fire’s down but I’ll get it up again.” He held the candle up high to give Les and the woman some light.

It was Fran Kinsella. Les laid her out on the couch and put a cushion under her head. Busy lit several more candles and put more wood on the embers of the fire, then took out a half full bottle of rum from the sideboard and handed it to Les.