Chopper Unchopped (202 page)

THERE is a unique psychological point of interest I’d like to make. I haven’t been in a fight in or outside a pub since 1987. Well, I did have to smack a few wombats to the ground in those days but that was just a little workout in the name of good humour rather than a serious desire to maim anyone.

Then I was young and silly and in my thirties, now I am forty-five and the days of pub brawling are behind me.

When I walk into a pub now I see the look on the face of a smart-arse sometimes, a would-be punch-on artist who would like to get a reputation. The look says: ‘He doesn’t look that tough to me and I reckon I could take him.’ I will then look at him and give a little smile and wink and I can see their tiny minds ticking over: ‘What if he’s carrying a gun or a weapon?’

‘No, he’s only wearing a t-shirt. He’s got a bull neck, big arms and big shoulders but he’s gone to fat. He’ll run out of puff. He may be strong but he is no longer fast. I’ll wait until he gets a bit more pissed.’ While these numbnuts are going through these mental equations they should notice that I will change to drinking Crown Lagers, not because I am a toff, but because their thin necks make them excellent to use in a serious pub brawl. Grab the neck and smash the bottom and you could rip the neck out of King Kong. The art of using a Crown Lager, beer glass or pool cue in a pub brawl seems to be lost on the youth of today. They pull a syringe from their puny arms and wave it around and expect to get respect.

The point is that some of these so-called tough guys could easily punch the shit out of me, but even the dimmest must know there’s always tomorrow. ‘I don’t want my house burned down or a hole put in my back one dark night,’ is what they should be thinking.

I look over and I can see them relax. ‘Fuck it, he isn’t bothering me, why should I bother him.’ Good idea.

I always recall the words of the great Ronnie Kray: ‘No-one beats a legend.’ But as The Texan once said, ‘anyone who drinks in a pub can be got at’.

This is no longer a great issue to me as a new father, a chicken farmer and woodcutter. I will slip out every now and again for a quiet one but no longer get physical. If I get on the tear eventually there will be some punk who wants a go and if I win I will end up in jail, and if I lose I will have to avenge the defeat out of embarrassment and I will end up in jail anyway.

Either way, I’m too old and too cunning for that. When I had my baby son in my arms I grew into a man instead of being the big kid I have always been. Now I have serious responsibilities and it’s frightening. I have given of the smokes, cut back on the grog, got a passport, a driver’s licence and an American Express card. Once I had a licence to kill, now I’ve got a licence to drive. I am a respected member of the community but when I stand in a bar I am a freak and for me it could be a death trap waiting to go off. This being a good citizen bullshit isn’t real easy.

I HAVE seen so much pain and suffering in my life. I have had people die in my arms and die at my hand. I thought I could not sink lower but I was wrong. I have now been lowered into the abyss of Hell.

I have been banned from the only pub in town. The Richmond Arms. Twenty-three years in jail getting pissed on potato peelings and now I have been blocked from sitting on a bar stool shooting the breeze, as compared to shooting a dago.

As usual, dear reader, it all started as a misunderstanding that got out of control. I popped into town for about thirty pots and some bloke thought the fat bloke in the t-shirt with tatts on his arm was an easy target.

There is always a wombat around who wants to be able to tell his mates at the darts club that he laid one on Chopper Read. Usually I can jolly them around and it all ends up with a couple of pictures for their scrap-book and a pat on the back but this time I was, perhaps, just a little bit crankier than usual.

Any rate this bloke wanted a fight and he got it. I belted him and he fell down. Big deal. He was in his early forties and people said I shouldn’t flog an old bloke, but pardon me, so am I.

A while back I gave a few twenty year olds a tap and I was told to leave the young blokes alone … you can’t win, can you?

I suppose I’m to get pissed, tie myself to a chair and let a pack of spastics flog my guts out, then I would be a great bloke. Just because I was pissed people thought I couldn’t fight. Wrong. I can still fight, drunk or sober. I have written a letter of apology to the publicans at the Richmond Arms with $50 to buy the wombat a steak for dinner and a steak for his eye. After all, he didn’t call the police so he couldn’t be all bad.

The barmaids drove me home that night but when Mary-Ann found out what had happened she physically attacked me and I can tell you, she could punch on better than the idiot at the pub the night before. Mary-Ann barred me from the pub as well. Will I have to get Michael Hodgman QC to fight for me again? He will have to leave the Criminal Bar to battle for me in the Public Bar. Will it ever end?

I MUST seriously consider the fact that I am an alcoholic. I must stand up and say ‘My name is Mark Brandon Read and I am an alcoholic,’ the only difference is that I have no desire to give up. Time passes by so nicely with a cold one in one’s hand. Maybe it is something to do with the name but like Oliver Reed, I admit I have a problem but will not allow it to interfere with my duties.

I don’t beat up my wife, or drink away the food or rent money, I do not lie down in gutters or lay my hands on other men’s wives when drunk. I am a totally socially acceptable drunk. I could be a role model for drunks. I should be studied by drunks so they learn how to behave when drunk.

I no longer mix drink and chainsaws, try not to drink and drive and I don’t have a gun licence so I cannot drink and shoot. Those who knew me in Melbourne knew that I always had a gun when pissed so they would now look upon me as a saint. Now I will turn the other cheek and walk away … to another bar.

Those of you who tut tut should remember that Henry Lawson was a drunk and they put his pickled head on the ten dollar note. So to you wowsers I say pooh to you all and to the barman I say, make mine a double and be quick about it, too.

HAVING fed the chickens and assorted animals around the farm I pick up the paper to find that Gerardo Mannella failed in the fifty metre dash against two killers in North Fitzroy.

Gerry may have been quick, but you can’t outrun a bullet. Gerry’s brother Vince got whacked about nine months earlier about two streets away. I can remind you all of the movie
Once Upon A Time In America
with Robert De Niro, let’s call this
Once Upon A Time In Australia.

If I told you that since the start of 1998 one man has been single handedly whacking off everyone, including Mad Charlie, Fat Al and the Mannella boys, you would tell me to get back in the henhouse and get the eggs. If I told you that all Italian organised crime was now run from South Australia and headed by a Mafia Don, known as Pauly, you would probably laugh.

What if I told you the seeds of this war started back with my crew and Big Al’s crew back in the 1970s? Some of Big Al’s people have moved to Pauly’s side following Gangitano’s death. There are others who are now walking dead men. I have no blue with Pauly, and his right hand man was once part of my H Division Crew. Mad Charlie was very rich when he died, but no-one seems to have worked out what happened to his money. Maybe someone got the money to fund a gang war.

Make no mistake the bodies will keep falling but for reasons I don’t understand no-one seems to get excited. You can find it between the fashion pages and the sports lift-out. They write more about a new risotto recipe than the blood and guts of an underworld war. God help us and pass me a cafe latte.

About eight weeks before I got out of jail in 1998 I got a letter saying that the grave had already been dug for the man who shot Alphonse. Since then the grave has been filled up with Dago bodies and Alphonse’s killer is still walking around.

Let’s make it clear on the long range forecast. Before this is finished it will make the old Market Murders look like nude mud wrestling. There is a group of whackers who ran around flogging, belting and shooting people when they were part of Al’s team. Each and every one of them has been noted and their dance cards have been marked. They will all get a visit and then will head to the morgue.

Take young Gerry. You kill the older brother, then you have to kill the younger one to make sure there is no chance of revenge. The people moving the pieces on the chess board have been playing the game for more than thirty years and don’t act out of impatience. There are people walking around Melbourne now who don’t even know their movements have been checked and logged. Their killers are just waiting for the call, then they will go to the spot where they know their target will be, take a couple of headshots and move on. Step by step, that whole crew will be wiped out.

In years to come we will talk of the sabre-toothed tiger, the dodo and Alphonse’s crew in the same breath, all extinct.

But they won’t say the same about Tasmanian chicken farmers.

I was considering retiring from crime writing but from what I have heard I may have a lot more to write about quite soon. Watch this space. There are more bodies to come.

GOODBYE Jimmy The Greek, a small-time bit player in a much larger production. Dimitrious Belias, thirty-eight years old, got it on the 9/9/99 in the carpark of a St Kilda Road office complex. Good postcode, bad head wound.

Mad Charlie called Jimmy the Greek his money mover. He acted as a front man in card games, using Mad Charlie’s money, many years ago. He also bought and sold property for Charlie. He also did work for Alphonse and a few others over the years. He was not a full-time, full-on criminal. He would go to the edge without getting his hands dirty.

Jimmy the Greek was a small cog in an organised crime wheel, simply part of the machine. He would not be worth a mention except for the way he died. It is just that the death of Alphonse, then Mad Charlie, has made a lot of mice turn into lions overnight. The reserves are now getting a game in the seniors and some of them won’t be up to it when the going gets tough.

In the old days Jimmy the Greek could be controlled with a back-hander. The fact that he was put off indicated he had risen to a level where he was important enough to kill.

Some of the shitkickers have been promoted over the graves of their former bosses.

Jimmy would borrow money to gamble. He was a good gambler but he wasn’t as good at keeping his word of honour. When he broke his word he may have received a slap in the mouth a few years ago from men who are now dead. Lions can afford to forgive, mice can’t afford such grand gestures.

Bang, bang, see you later, Jimmy.

ONE of the more interesting chaps I have come across in my travels was Johnny Higgs — or, as the police call him on him in their more formal reports, John William Samuel Higgs. He was the so-called amphetamine king of Melbourne. He was about ten years older than me, a real knockabout old hood and a founding member of the Black Uhlans Motorcycle gang.

In 1987, The Jew and myself, backed by a hand-picked team of similar nutters, were all set to grab Higgsy. He was a perfect target for us: a rich, powerful player in the underworld, but no great shakes on his own. Let me put it another way, toilet paper would have more lasting power under stress than Higgs. He was a fat cat just waiting to be collected. He was involved with Alphonse Gangitano and Gilbert Besanko, in what I don’t know, but I doubt if it was charitable interests.

But it was Mad Charlie who pulled our coats on that one. ‘Higgsy is all right, Chop. Jesus, ya can’t kill everyone,’ he told me.

‘Yes, we can,’ said Dave The Jew. Charlie then went on to say how Higgsy was a better friend than enemy but Dave had the answer for that. ‘He won’t be coming back so the enemy factor does not apply,’ he said. It’s hard to argue with logic like that.

Then Charlie came clean. ‘Look, I’m in business with him and it’s hard to make money with a bloke who’s dead.’ Charlie was providing chemicals to Higgs’s amphetamine network and a war would have been bad news.

It was around that time the Besanko and his crew invited me to a footy game at Footscray. Higgsy was supposed to be there but didn’t turn up. I suspect he had been warned off by Mad Charlie.

Higgsy was the power when it came to speed but he owed his position to Mad Charlie. One word and he would been in a cellar having his feet warmed with the blue flame of the oxy gear. Mad Charlie had the power of life and death because his crew was made up of psychopaths pretending to be businessmen, not businessmen pretending to be nutters.

By Mad Charlie just keeping his crew in check blokes like Higgsy were able to go on and on. He was the sort who may carry $30,000 to a card game and to people who would take a contract for $5000 it was easy money, and very tempting.

Higgsy was one of those few knockabouts who mixed with most of the criminal crews in Melbourne. He was known by the Painters and Dockers, drug dealers, bikies and Alphonse’s mob. He also seemed to have an interesting relationship with several police. Later he was able to get the drug squad burgled when he needed some information on a witness. It always pays to have friends, and friends who want to be paid.

Higgsy was powerful, he dealt in amphetamines, dabbled in cocaine and did a good line in fake American cash.

Higgsy ran the most powerful crew in Melbourne, not the most feared but the most powerful. They weren’t the bang, bang, shoot ’em up type of crims, they were cloak and dagger boys — in it for the money, not the fun.

They lived on secrets, not bloodshed. Higgsy was powerful. He could control the street price of speed like the captains of industry control the rise and fall of share prices.

He was smart enough to make sure all his friends made money as he did and he also made sure that his enemies copped a sling. It was then in everyone’s interest that Higgsy be on the street controlling nearly twenty amphetamines labs.

He was also smart enough not to be a smartarse. He may have been nearly as rich as a media mogul but he always looked as if he needed a quid. He didn’t brag and boast and get people off-side. He knew how to keep a secret and his left hand thought he only had one arm because it had never met his right.

It took the coppers eight years of solid investigations to get him and although he went to jail for a few years, he’s alive and I would think he made enough money to make sure he will be a rich man when he gets out.

He teamed up with Mad Charlie around 1986, around the time he would have known I was about to get out of jail. I wonder whether he teamed up with Charlie as an added form of protection from me. If it was, it worked. I took a lot of money from Higgsy’s people over the years but there was never ever any comeback against us. Higgsy knew he was making enough money not to start a war he couldn’t possibly win.

In 1987 Higgsy’s chief back-up was Shane Goodfellow and Shane couldn’t get over me with a pole vault and a step ladder. In the drug world mice can roar like lions.

To head hunters like me, Higgsy was a joke, an easy target, money for jam, yet he survived and got bigger.

Looking back, I don’t think he was a mouse who roared like a lion. Maybe he was a lion all the time, pretending to be a mouse.

I PICKED up the paper in July 1999, having completed my chores and I read that an old mate turned enemy, then a sort of secret mate again was released from jail. Peter John Allen, walked out of Loddon Prison in Castlemaine at 9.30am. Waiting for him was a stretched limousine and chilled champagne. Once upon a time I would have loved to stretch his neck but those days have passed.

It was good to see that Peter looked trim and fit, very Squizzy Taylor, in his posh suit and Robert De Niro sunglasses. Trevor Pettingill was walking beside him, looking ten years older than he should, but weeds always age quicker the oak trees. Peter was a little man with a gun and an ego nearly as big as my own. He had a sense of comedy that kept him alive in the valley of death.

I am about to chainsaw eight ton of firewood and $65 to $85 a ton — Peter would laugh at that sort of small change. Peter and I came from a different world where you would win and lose fortunes nearly every day. It was fairyland stuff. He would lose it and then make some more. Big deal.

I don’t think Peter ever set out to be a heroin boss. He always saw himself as a gunman and a standover man but heroin, and the money you can make from it, just sort of got in the way.

He watched his brother Dennis build a multi-million dollar drug empire and go mad along the way. Peter was calm about it and I would suspect he would have always kept a little more in the piggy bank than others suspected.

I am not suggesting that he will buy a timber run and cut firewood, but after a while the game of cops and robbers can get on your nerves.

I will make a prediction. Peter, mate, if you want to jump back into it again, you will have to kill one man who is very close to you. You always trusted no-one as a hard-headed gangster, but now in middle age you may think you need a friend. You don’t, not that type of friend, any rate.

I am not advising you to get a cut lunch and a nine to five job but don’t allow silly Gangitano’s dreams to enter your thinking.

You are one of the most together crooks I know, in or out of jail, and all bad blood aside Peter John Allen is a tough, hard, cool and calm thinking machine. He was always a man on a mission.

Peter, you are the head of a big chain but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and we both know your weakest link is as weak as piss.

I will give you a year to kill the weak link or he will kill you. Better still, walk away. You are a movie star surrounded by cartoon characters. You an old lion backed up by mice.

Walk away now or, like Alphonse and Mad Charlie, you will be done by people you trust.

They like the way things are and they won’t want some old jail house Godfather telling them what to do. I fear the band will have to play again — and Peter, keep an eye on the lead singer.

I HAVE a top secret silent phone number that I have only given to a few people however I think it must be listed in the yellow pages under ‘Mentally Ill, Please Ring.’

I was getting on with life when the phone rang and it was Amos Rodney Atkinson. Now Amos only ever had a nodding relationship with sanity and it would appear they no longer speak.

He rang me from Wagga Wagga in NSW. I would have been more comfortable if he had rung from Mars and his rocket ship had blown a gasket.

His phone was off and it was like talking down a 44 gallon drum. Amos was pissed and I was pissed off. ‘I love you brother, rah, rah, rah, why do you hate me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t hate you, Jesus, I made you,’ I told him. He obviously forgot that in the crime world I was Doctor Frankenstein and he had a bolt through the neck.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘In your books, please stop calling me an Abo, it’s offensive.’

Now it has come to this. You can talk about slamming someone’s knob in a car door, shooting some wombat in the guts, or removing some sucker’s toes with a blow torch and that is considered the height of good humour but mention, in passing, that someone like Amos is a bit on the dusky side and you’ll get ten years from the politically correct police.

‘Chopper, the homicide squad have been talking to me about holding onto people while you cut off their toes.’

‘Amos, you are what you are because Chopper Read tells people what you are,’ I reminded him.

‘You and Dave wanted to be legends, now welcome to fame.’

‘Chopper, you’re not going to bag me in the movie are you, Dave’s a bit worried as well.’

‘Look,’ I told him, ‘If you thought we were pretty good at standing over people you should see these film people. After I signed their contract they can do anything they want. If they want you, me and Dave in green satin frocks standing in front of the docks singing the
Sound of Music
, that is what’s gonna happen.