Chopper Unchopped (192 page)

Yes, millionaire businessmen like Peter the Poof controlled large chunks of the prostitution industry, but on a day to day level the girls and parlour managers and operators were all part of the criminal sub culture.

They were good days. Telling on people was frowned on. Everyone knew each other. We would rob the parlours on a Friday night and be drinking with the girls on Saturday night.

We would walk in, smack the manager and bouncer minder about, rob the place and get our dicks sucked before the police were called and the girls promptly gave the police false descriptions of the offenders. Would have been a funny sort of line-up, eh.

I’d walk in and say ‘come on girls, you know the drill’ with a cheeky smile. By this time Mad Charlie was baseball batting the parlour minder and manager.

Any bloke in the place got a bat in the guts while all the girls got was a dick in the mouth. Our trick was we took the parlour money generally kept in some strong box in the kitchen or in the pocket of the manager.

We wouldn’t take the girls’ personal earnings. Most girls didn’t like the hoons they worked for as they were often ripped off. The parlour owners, operators, managers and minders all thought that free sex was a perk of the job and the girls thought that putting a smile on our faces in one room while the parlour boss and/or minder screamed for mercy in the other room was quite comic.

The girls would tell us to hit a parlour at a certain time when the boss called in to collect the night’s takings. I mean robbing a parlour blind without some inside knowledge meant you could hit a place for twenty dollars. A lot of parlours had floor safes.

We started off blind but our eyes soon opened. A parlour boss might smack a girl in the mouth for some nonsense to force her to have sex with one of his mates or a policeman for nothing.

She’d cop it sweet and do it — but if she saw us in a nightclub we’d have one more chick wanting us to rob her parlour and bash the heart and lungs out of the boss, the minder or her hoon pimp boyfriend. And, by the way, she’d say, you had better gang bang me as well just to make it look good.

Drag queens were the worst. If the parlour boss offended a drag queen she would go to the end of the earth to get her revenge. There was this one dark New Zealand drag queen transsexual, I never knew her full fitting and fixture as I never saw her with her gear off.

All I knew was she was a boy who looked like a girl with silicon tits who loved sucking dicks. Her name was Adele and she conned on to Mad Charlie at the Chevron Night Club.

We tried to tell Charlie that she was a transvestite but she already had a mouth full of him at the bar while a gang of us stood around blocking the view of onlookers and keeping guard.

I never claimed we were a toffy crew.

Within a month every pimp, hoon and parlour boss that this boy-girl had fallen out with over the previous twelve months in Melbourne had been hit by Mad Charlie’s crew.

Then one night Mad Charlie fronts up, almost in tears.

‘Adele is a bloke,’ he said.

I mean how many times do you need to screw someone before you work out what sex they are. Was it the six o’clock shadow perhaps? The same thing happened when we hit the Crest Massage Parlour. Mad Charlie pumped the pants off a chick named Lee T. who turned out to be a full sex change transsexual in the 1970s.

Melbourne nightclubs and parlours were full of drag queens and transvestites. We knew most of ’em and they were all solid as rocks in a police station and good people but you could always spot them.

They were just too over the top, too much swing in the hips, too much tit showing, too show girlie.

They were like cartoons come to life, caricatures of real women. The voice was a giveaway and the look in the eye. To have sex with one and claim later you didn’t know till after — well, okay, I’ll let that go. Maybe you and your dick are mentally retarded. But for it to happen twice — I’m sorry. Really, you’d have to be blind, or going down a mineshaft, not to notice.

The fact is, Mad Charlie was a secret ‘poo jammer’. It was one of the reasons Dave the Jew always held Charlie in disdain. You see, Mad Charlie was still allowing himself to be tricked by transvestites and transsexuals in the 1980s. Alphonse Gangitano was more open about his love of female impersonators, drag queens, transvestites and transsexuals.

I’m not condemning either man for being bisexual, only for being false pretenders.

The shooting of a parlour boss named Kelly in 1974 was the highlight of the year and as far as Mad Charlie and I was concerned Kelly’s shooting proved to us that anything was possible.

Two young kids opened their eyes after that and saw that as long as you were willing to back it up with blood, anything was possible.

Now to any police type person or prosecution lawyer who has shoplifted this book and read this, do not take what I have just said as a confession to any unsolved crime. It was just a small turning point I’ve made mention of, an example of how things can happen for a young couple who are prepared to work hard etc etc …

It didn’t matter, anyway. Both Mad Charlie and myself were on our way by then with the help of Peter Rand. We could have controlled a large slice of Melbourne’s prostitution industry by 1975 only Charlie and his dick got us pinched on a rape charge.

I was acquitted, Charlie was found guilty. Had that event not happened both Charlie and myself would have become entrenched in the world of so-called organised crime that year. Instead, Mad Charlie had to wait five years and I just launched myself into the world of the criminal mental case and totally disorganised crime.

It seemed a much better place to be at the time, although the superannuation wasn’t so hot.

Organised criminals are generally killed by disorganised criminals. It sounds funny, but it happens to be true. The truth is that crime is only ever organised in the movies.

THERE is one good thing about being a so-called best-selling author. All sorts of people try to elbow their way between the pages of my next book. All I have to do is sit at the bar with a camera and they fall out of the wood work. And I don’t just mean sword swallowers and jelly-arsed whores.

All sorts.

As a married man I’m unable to take advantage of the various situations that present themselves. Indeed, I’m barely able to understand them, but my friends sometimes explain what’s going on. Even if I did do anything naughty I couldn’t write about it, but I swear I don’t. It’s the same with guns. I can no longer write about guns as by law I’m not allowed to have a gun and these days I obey the law.

It’s all a bit hard when the subject matter of my books is made up of guns and girls, bullets and boobs. My wife tells me my books dwell too much on the sleazy and sordid and the police seem to be of the opinion that if I write about crime I must still be involved. Sometimes writing a book can be so difficult. I like to include photos but I then have to explain that a photo is just a photo. It means nothing, proves nothing. A photo is just salad dressing to add to the story. A little Asian chick sits down beside me and says ‘Whose camera is that?’

‘Mine,’ I reply.

‘You not gonna use any photos of me in your book are you?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘Well, you can if you want.’

‘Nah, you better not. Nah, I don’t care,’ she continues.

All this is going on before I’d even taken a photo. Her name was Nickie Nguyen Vu Oanh. She spelt it out for me as I wrote it down. Now, mind you, all this is for a young lady who can’t make her mind up about being in my book. I hadn’t asked her if she would like to be and I hadn’t requested a photo.

I sink a few more beers.

Nickie is wearing a bikini top and a pair of short shorts and a pair of knee high boots under her dress. I know, because she whizzed the dress off when I handed the barmaid my camera.

‘What will you say about me in you book, something nice?’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘But you don’t know me,’ she went on. ‘What will you say?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I’ll think of something,’ I said.

‘You could take me to dinner,’ said Nickie.

‘My wife wouldn’t like that,’ I replied, ‘but don’t worry, I’ll say something nice.’

Nickie smiled.

I took a few photos of her and I got the barmaid to snap off a few. Nickie was happy.

‘I still haven’t decided if I want to be in your book,’ she said as I walked out of the bar.

‘You’ve had your photo taken with me and given me the correct spelling of your name. Make up your mind,’ I snapped.

‘Yeah, okay.’ She wiggled about on her stool like she had worms. ‘But what will you say?’

‘If you took me to dinner you’d have something to write about,’ she giggled.

I needed to take this chick to dinner like I needed another hole in the head. I looked at her and laughed and said something about writing about the silly things little girls say and do for a photo and a sentence or two in a book.

This final remark sort of went over Nickie’s head but she sensed what I had just said could have been a very gently worded insult. It wasn’t really an insult.

I’ve had females from all walks of life slide up to me in bars and proceed to chew my ears off (so to speak) with the story of their lives. ‘You should write a fucking book,’ I reply.

But that’s too hard, of course. Why write a book when you can vomit your life story out to some poor no-eared bastard who is already writing one.

But among this river of cut glass I find a gem or two, stories well worth the telling, told to me by tits and legs that look like they stepped out of a magazine and me without my camera. But again I come back to being able to write about sex and crime without upsetting the people near to me and without meaning to do so.

I do seem to upset my wife. To check up on a story I may have to contact people I may have to ring people up or write to people, some of these people might be active criminals or ladies I know who came from a certain world. None of this sits well with a wife concerned that I not contact people from my past. Understandable and I agree smart but the books pay the bills and the books are crime stories.

It seems that to do anything in this life, at least in my life, I cannot seem to do it without hurting the feelings of others. It’s like people who go out of their way to push themselves between the pages of my books and there have been a few.

Nickie was one of the more harmless ones. They may get their wish and squeeze their way in but that don’t mean they are going to like it when they get there. Who was it who said that people who write about people end up with no friends at all. Everyone wants to read about themselves but not everyone will like what they read.

MY mate Shane Farmer can spin yarns all night long and, like all great bar room storytellers, for him the truth of the yarn isn’t as important as the spinning of the story. The bar room yarn is a fishing story: no-one can say the bloke didn’t go fishing …  it’s just the size of the fish that he nearly caught that we smile at.

‘You know when I took Alison to Las Vegas I gave her $300 to get her hair done,’ said Shane. ‘Now you’d think $300 would cover the fucking lady’s hairdresser. When she came back her hair looked great.’

‘Give us some dough,’ she asked.

‘What, I gave you $300 before. Don’t tell me a bloody hairdo cost $300.’

‘Yeah it did,’ replied Alison.

That $300 hair-do story is told and re-told.

Shane knew Mad Charlie back in Charlie’s walking stick days. Charlie once fell off a ladder painting a house and did his ankle in and used a walking stick and took to hitting bouncers and nightclub staff with his stick when he went out at night.

Shane was forced to duck many a wild swing from Charlie’s walking stick. His American yarns are the best. Let’s face it. No-one can call him a liar, because they weren’t there.

If you tell a story about playing poker with Tony Bennett and Wayne Newton and the chief of detectives for the Las Vegas police, who’s going to call you a liar?

If the guy tells me he met Sammy Davis Junior and Dean Martin in the late 1970s in Las Vegas and was once tossed down the stairs by three of Elvis Presley’s bodyguards in a whore house in Memphis, Tennessee, who am I to question it?

Mad Charlie came back from America with a story that he had met and said hello to Don Carlo Gambino …  just the boss of all bosses of the American Mafia, that’s all.

Alphonse Gangitano also came back from Italy with a truck load of stories about meeting with this or that Mafia boss but, personally, if I’m going to sit and listen to a fishing story I want to listen to one I can laugh at.

I mean what’s the use of going overseas unless you can come back with some wild yarn. Ray Chuck always claimed he belted Reggie Kray in a prison in England. The opposite was the truth, maybe, but at least he did get to meet Reggie at the end of the fist.

Shane Farmer was in Las Vegas the day Howard Hughes died. The whole town stopped for a sixty-second silence.

Stories like that I can listen to, $300 haircuts and poker games with singers I can listen to, Alison telling me about Miss Erotica contests and this Penthouse Pet blow-up doll telling the other girls in the dressing rooms that they may as well not bother because she had screwed all six judges.

She said she’d met all six judges beside the swimming pool that morning. The only problem was, laughed Alison, the real judges were women involved in the magazine, modelling and beauty industry.

Miss Smartarse had screwed six blokes all right. Only problem for her was that had all been judges in the two previous contests.

Let us now turn to some other myths, legends and folk stories. First, the myth.

GET the big bastard pissed. I want him mellow and easy to handle was the word. Okay, it’s March 16, 1998, and Chopper Read turned up pissed on the set for the first episode of Libby Gorr’s new live-to-air ABC TV series
McFeast.

Of course Elle and the whole TV crew claimed not to have known how much I had drunk. Bullshit. I had drunkenly annoyed half the female staff in the place. I even draped a drunken arm around Tina Arena as I sucked on a can of beer and joked with her about the death of Alphonse. Tina is a little Sicilian girl from the western suburbs of Melbourne. She’s met more gangsters than I have.