Chopper Unchopped (197 page)

Four stories really. I covered myself by alerting Mary-Ann right away but I will say that each wife made her sly move with her own husband not twenty feet away. Not a physical move, just a polite verbal whisper that I need not call a plumber if ever my main pipe got blocked up.

I mean this is dangerous stuff. Three of the four guys in question had heavy duty firearm collections. I mean I was sad to see them go, but back-dooring Mary-Ann is a no no.

I’ve been through all that shit in previous relationships and always come undone.

Friendship, that’s what I was originally on about. The great mystery word. It’s like the word mateship. It was a word that meant something in Australia, now it’s just an overused word meaning if you can be of use to someone then that someone will become your ‘mate’.

Yes, there are exceptions and contradictions to every rule of law but, generally speaking, friendship and mateship is dead. Now it’s all just a mass of smiling false pretenders all picking each other’s pockets. Yeah I’m an old jaded sceptic, but I’m not far wrong, am I?

I can no longer demand loyalty because the people who would give it are from my old world. I could never give it back. To these people it is blood loyalty and that means blood can and will be spilled. I cannot go back so I must accept my new good time friends and say goodbye to the real hard time mates.

I WAS sitting in the Brunswick Hotel in Liverpool Street, Hobart, the other day. It’s owned by Butch Hudson, Peter Hudson’s brother, as in the former Hawthorn great who could shoot almost as straight as me. It was there that I bumped into this cross-eyed chick.

Now, as a rule you don’t run into many cross-eyed girls and when you do they sort of stand out in your memory and it reminded me of cross-eyed Sharon — or Clarence as we use to call her. Don’t get me wrong, Sharon may have been cross-eyed but she never crossed her legs. They were permanently open to suggestion.

The expression ‘every man and his dog’ comes to mind when I think of Sharon. Okay, I’m a bit one-eyed in my view of the woman. After all, she did try to sink me on a murder charge but picture this, if you will, a cross-eyed prostitute with a great body, and I mean model material.

She had all the goodies in all the right places, it’s just that the chick was cross-eyed. This girl had one eye looking at the other and neither of ’em looking at you.

She had to wear glasses but would not wear them so when she was working she was as blind as a bat. Now brothels aren’t brightly lit places. Dim lighting is the order of the day (or night) and you had this chick who was so blind she would stab herself in the eye when she went down on you.

It was like rolling about with Mr Magoo — if Mr Magoo looked like Jane Fonda.

All the boys knew her. She was famous. I mean rolling up to a function with a cross-eyed whore was considered quite a giggle round my neck of the woods. She was also a junkie and really loved her heroin.

Now, to some of you who don’t understand the ways of the underworld, let me explain. Prostitutes who love heroin and don’t like to pay for it — well, they get screwed a lot. So crossed-eyed Sharon was more than famous, she was a legend.

She came to visit me in 1984 when I was in Geelong Prison and you guessed it, I fell in love. I know love can be blind, but in this case it was cross-eyed. The chick blew in, blew me, and blew out again. Who says romance is dead?

What chance did I have? I’d been in jail a long time, I was seeing Margaret at the time but I was a greedy bastard. I also had Tracey Warren and a few others popping in to see me.

I mean when you’re twenty nine years old you just don’t worry about that sort of shit.

None of these girls were waiting for me with their legs nailed to the floor, I mean when some of your lady friends (not Margaret, of course, she was respectable) are working in brothels looking over their shoulder saying to the bloke humping them, ‘I’m Chopper Read’s girlfriend’ it is hardly
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, is it?

So don’t be too unkind in your thinking in relation to my past jailhouse love life. Anyway, back to cross-eyed Sharon. This chick was a sexual public toilet with the body of a beauty queen and providing she wore her dark glasses or you didn’t look her in the eye, all was well.

Anyway, I wanted to get Sharon a diamond ring so I rang Mad Charlie and asked him to go around to Sharon’s place with a diamond ring. ‘Not another girlfriend, Chopper,’ he said. ‘Jesus, give it a rest.’ But Charlie went around and gave her the diamond ring and then came in to visit me.

‘Hey, Chopper, have you had a good look at this chick?’

‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ replied Charlie ‘apart from being a prostitute and a junkie, the fucking moll is cross-eyed.’

‘Yeah’ I said ‘but she can suck the chrome off an exhaust pipe.’ I felt it was gallant of me to defend her in such a way.

‘She’d fucking need to,’ snarled Charlie, ‘she’d starve to death otherwise.’ He always was a romantic, being European and all.

Charlie had a blunt way of putting things, but he was quite right. I got out of prison and had a good close look at Sharon. There was no nice way to put it, her life was parked in a handicapped zone. That’s what jail can do. Frogs start to look like princesses. Sharon ended up with Nick the Greek for a while. The cross-eyed give up junkie maggot got passed around like the only toilet roll at a footy match and I thought I was in love with it. I wasn’t. It was all part of the prison madness that grips the hearts and minds of only the lonely.

THE last time I saw my mate Shane Farmer and his girl, Alison Downes, Shane wanted me to invest in some lap dancing club in South Yarra and Alison said she needed to see a psychiatrist.

I don’t know if either was serious. Nightclub people are nice people but they all live in their own strange twilight zone. I think the lack of natural light eventually starves the brainbox.

I’ve known a lot of nightclub owners and they are all carbon copies of each other. They stagger from rich to poor, from diamonds to broken glass, in an after dark world of make believe.

They live like millionaires and movie stars in a world of dreams and strobe lighting and, like vampires, they come to life at night. There have been a few of them that I have threatened with a wooden stake (and a couple with sawn-off shotty as well).

Every club owner and dancer I’ve met could write their own book if they could sit still long enough to do it, which they couldn’t.

They live in a three-dimensional nervous breakdown. After a while I’ve got to just walk away before I get invited too deeply into the madness they live in.

I used to know a guy named Athol. He ran more nightclubs and knew more about nightclubs than anyone in Melbourne. Mad Charlie introduced me to him.

The bloke has made and lost millions. In the end he got swallowed up by the monster he created. His whole life was night time, loud music, and strobe lighting.

If you invest in one nightclub you invest in a sort of make believe madness. Booze, drugs, girls, music — it’s like you have bought yourself your own private slice of Hollywood, then you hock your arse and your first investment to the bank to reinvest in a second club, bigger and better, and the roller coaster begins. In the end you’re a nightclub boss worth a million on paper, driving a leased Lamborghini living in a leased million dollar home with a leased girlfriend, renting a penthouse in Surfers Paradise with a lifestyle costing you thousands a day, borrowing more and more money to buy a slice of bigger and better clubs.

Why do they do it? Well, they have to get the new club because the punters are so fickle. Every cool spot ends up being uncool. The crowd moves on and the owner is left with a couple of empty club dunnies full of spew and a few ecstasy tablets on the floor. They have to try and anticipate what the crowd wants and provide it before they even know they want it. It stands to reason that eventually they will zig when they should have zagged and come a gutser. They want the A crowd in their club to get the drongos to come in as well. Can you think how much Scotch and Southern Comfort they’ve poured down the gullets of bit part actors, TV hacks and pissed sportsmen just to create that ‘in crowd’ feeling.

If nightclub owners had any actual cash we would have been kidnapping them years ago. Ha ha. Invest money in a nightclub? Forget it. I’d rather invest in a pay toilet. You don’ have to put strobe lights in a dunny. Most of the nightclub mot are good people, great to talk to, with a thousand stories, but in the end it’s the twilight zone.

When I was a gunnie years ago, club owners were all part of the action and the girls that went with that life. It was all bullshit, bullets and big tits. Maybe I’m getting older and wiser, or maybe I’ve just seen too much, I don’t know.

I’ve got to stop writing now. Poop Foot my cat don’t like writing and when he has had enough he jumps up on the table and sits on the pad so I must leave the hefty and unanswered question of nightclubs and nightclub owners alone for now. When a cat puts its arse on your masterpiece you wonder whether he is voting with Mary-Ann to say it’s a pile of crap.

Via con dios Amigos.

DEATH is a funny business and the very, very few people who deal in death for dollars are themselves a funny lot. There aren’t as many professional hit men about as the police, media and popular television hacks would have you believe. But the world is full of killers. Everyone can kill if pushed. Even you, dear reader, sitting there looking into a world of death and blood through the pages in this book. You probably think you could never enter the world of the Chopper Reads. Think again. It only takes someone to push the right (or wrong) button and everyone can go off until the object of hatred is no longer breathing.

So let us not mix up common or garden murder, or the act of murder, with an execution. I want to talk about the professional hitman, not a once-only mug who got paid to kill another mug and got caught and then rests himself and his wombat reputation in prison.

As a hitman, I mean a real true blue, regular as clock work, thirty on the scoreboard over a twenty-year period and not so much as a fucking parking ticket. That sort. By the way, there were never more than a dozen of them in Australia and Chris Flannery never even got a mention. Just because you get put off by a hitman don’t mean you are one.

There are only nine year-in, year-out hit men in Australia today and they are all friends or friends of friends and can, if need be, reach each other.

Nine year-in, year-out full on hit men and four gunsmiths, between the nine of them and the gunsmiths get their guns from one of three sources. So, all in all, between hit men, gunsmiths and suppliers you have a network of sixteen men in all.

Each hit man may be part of a crew, a team, or yes, even a gang. Let’s say a bike gang for example. (Now, dear reader, that might be a hint).

However, their loyalty to their gunsmith overrides their loyalty to their crew, team or gang. What am I trying to say? Am I trying to tell you something? Is the fat bloke in the white t-shirt hinting at something, maybe that I may predict certain things before they even happen? Then again, how could I possibly do that? I’m just a fat chicken farmer who spends his days stuffing chooks rather than drug dealers.

No-one needs pay any attention to my insane ranting and ravings, do they? So let’s get hypothetical. What would a bloke do if, for example, he heard about something that was to go off on or around the time of the Olympic Games?

Let’s just say that a fortune teller wrote a book and in that book the fortune teller predicted the death of a person. Where does the fortune teller stand legally? But what if the fortune teller happens to be a former hard core, heavy duty criminal with almost military type connections relating to the sale of illegal small arms ordinance. Now, if a fortune teller of that calibre was to make a prediction or give advance warning, a futuristic forecast based, let’s say, on a dream, then how would that place him legally?

We are talking about a fortune teller who has no interest at all in being questioned over anything. Gee, I bet that fortune teller could for example sell a hell of a lot of books if he was to write a book and name names …  but would the profit be worth the fucking headache. I don’t think so.

Anyway, a fortune teller who gets it right could be considered someone who had knowledge of a crime prior to the commission of that crime. Personally, I don’t think it would be a very smart thing at all for a fortune teller to make any rash predictions such as telling someone to check under the front seat before they start the car.

NOW this is a game called hypothetical and just to add legal safety to the yarn let’s use the word theoretical. And considering the state of mind of the author let’s throw in another word — certifiable.

A hypothetical Italian gent in South Australia, an old guy, very powerful in the Australian Italian criminal world, with relatives in Italy and America, is playing a game of cards with a younger Italian.

We will call the old Italian Paul and the younger one John or maybe Joe, okay? So now we begin the most wild and fantastic hypothetical yarn.

If you wanted to kill a famous person where would you do it? Not a political person and not a political event, but someone with more power than any politician and more fucking money. Easy, you’d pick a major sporting or entertainment event.

All the security is trained on the politicians, leaving big gaps in other security areas. The arrogance of politics is that politicians think they are the only worthwhile targets in the world when really no-one cares apart from the IRA. Anyway, back to the hypothetical. Let’s say there was a very very powerful man, a billionaire — no, not Kerry Packer, but another one.

What if he has stood on toes for years and two men, just as rich, or even a little richer, decided to fight back.

You can’t break him by taking his money so how can you hurt him? You kill his number one son. Yes, kill his son and shatter the enemy.

Psychological attack: kill the son.

It is easy enough to enter Australia to attend major sporting events such as Melbourne Grand Prix, The Melbourne Cup, tennis events, big yacht races, and to avoid all counter-surveillance and anti-terrorist, protective security police and private firms. Carlos, The Jackal, could walk around the Melbourne Cup with a bazooka strapped to his back and the coppers would think he was a drunk public servant in some stupid fancy dress gear.

The son has no security. However, it is taken for granted that his father sees to the son’s personal security without the son even knowing it. Nothing is left to chance. Perhaps the son’s interest in a certain Australian yacht race could be the best way of attack.

You can put a bodyguard on a yacht but that’s about it. The logistics of full and total protection for a man floating on water are limited, to say the least.

But you can’t use a skin diver and you can’t stick a bomb under the yacht.

The son’s security provided by dear old dad have thought of that, hence a phone call to a fat bloke in the white t-shirt. This is not for sure, Chopper, this is just a question, they say. A theoretical question, I reply. Yeah, a theoretical question. In my (old) business I have seen more people end up dead from theoretical questions than anything else. ‘If you wanted to blow up a boat with all the high-tech surveillance systems, I mean this kid had security up the arse, very hard to hit, how would you go about it?’

‘Is this for real?’ I asked.

‘No, no, it’s just a question. I’m having a debate with old Paul about how you could do this. General chit chat and hypothetical story told over phone.’

‘No-one has asked anyone to kill anyone but money is floating about for ideas, ways and means. I don’t know what’s going on but I got a five grand sling just to ring you,’ said Joe.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because you’re the only one who can reach the Jew or who could put it together. The only one I know, anyway,’ he says.

‘I told Paul you could fix it. Not that anything needs to be fixed. I’m only telling you what Paul told me,’ said Joe.

‘Fuck knows what drugs he’s taking but the money’s real. All they want is a good idea. These wombats will pay big money for a good idea, a good plan. No-one is gonna get killed. All they want is like a plot, a movie. If you was gonna do it, how would you do it?’ he asked.

‘Ring me back tomorrow, Joe. Let me think this over.’

Why they would ask a chicken farmer such questions is another question but I am a warm sort of fellow so I am always ready to help out. After all, knowledge (and a 9mm pistol) is power.

I sat and considered this theoretical hypothetical situation without being told who the so-called target was.

Enough was said in code for me to lock into the target.

Yacht race? Well, you wouldn’t do it at the start in Sydney. You’d do it at the finish in Hobart. Now, a torpedo would be the only way.

Once the yacht was anchored. Now I don’t have a torpedo but I know how to make one, as I’m sure most chicken farmers would …  one large oxygen cylinder, a fist full of plastic explosive and a small APM landmine.

Oxygen bottles float and they have parties on yachts at night.

The whole thing could be put into the water from a speed boat or rubber boat and pushed toward the yacht at a distance of twenty to sixty yards.

To be on the safe side use two. A big push and floating with the current, one home-made torpedo gently floats along.

Anything more than a gentle tap and vabooommm, up she goes.

It’s so simple, like most bombs. Of course, I could not swear to the safety of the bloke in the rubber boat or speed boat. Now you would have to wire up the plastic. I won’t go into detail. Other advice tells me I wouldn’t need to.

I’ve fired a .303 round into plastic explosive at one hundred yards and nothing happened. It needs a detonator and a charge to explode it. The way it is put together is not the guts of the story. The guts of this yarn was the fact that very serious people had been contacted in relation to the hypothetical murder of this man.

The fact that I’ve even written this much means it will never happen. Isn’t it weird? I’ve probably just saved his life.