Chopper Unchopped (206 page)

Amos cut his ears off while in
WW in
jail with me. Now he lives in Wagga and seems to live in the past. I know he wants to keep in touch with me but I suspect that Amos would be bad news for me because I believe police are interested in him over the supposed disappearance of several hanger-on types in the criminal world.

Good luck, Amos, but you’re on your own now.

A TOE-CUTTER of the old school. Lucky Lukacevic is ‘alleged’ to have killed three drug dealers in Western Australia and Victoria and beaten each charge when assorted jurors realised it was all a misunderstanding. He has modelled his career on me and why wouldn’t you? A hammerhead shark in a school of guppies, he is a real tough guy. He says I am his hero. Well, he should listen to the master and know when to pull up. Toecutters retire or end up dead. I know which is the best option.

AN OLD mate who had the biggest right hand punch in the underworld. Now in jail for killing a wombat called Johnny Turner. I believe Frankie when he said he wasn’t involved. The blood on the carpet may have come from a sleep walking haemophiliac. Ha ha.

ANOTHER old friend that I have had to flush out of my life. Has been convicted of rape and beating a young woman in front of her ten-year-old son. He is not due out of jail until 2012. Mick, if you’re ever passing my place, just keep driving. I don’t like your style and I wouldn’t let you near my hen house.

WAS a Romanian private eye. He mustn’t have been all that flash because he didn’t see them coming to get him. He was bashed and then shot about five times in the head. A touch of overkill, do you think?

His body turned up near Menzies Creek, near Emerald, just outside of Melbourne in June, 1998. I know who did it but I’m not telling. The Romanians have always like to go on the high wire without a net.

BILLY was a man who I once looked up to. In return I protected him when he was in jail. We have fallen out when I felt he did the wrong thing in Melbourne over a matter of money. I may be an old chicken tanner, but I can still reach out to the mainland. The money was hastily repaid.

A GOOD tough, old style crim, who was one of the Great Bookie Robbers. He was a man who knew where the bodies are buried. He had friends through the underworld and was well liked but some people didn’t like the fact that he stayed loyal to me. He died of a drug overdose in Easey Street, Collingwood in 1990. I don’t believe he was a junkie at the time.

Bad luck or hot shot? You work it out. My brain is full

Chopper’s back to what he knows best.

Buried bodies, buried guns, buried money and buried truths. Only one man who’s been on the inside tells it like it is about the hitmen, the bikie wars and the drug syndicates. His peers continue to die violent deaths, but he’s still alive to tell the real story. This is it.

WHAT if? What if there was an author who wrote about crime and therefore relied upon death to earn a living.

Like the lawyers, the pickle-nosed judges, the coppers, the social workers, the do-gooders, the do-badders, the drunken journos and the psycho book publishers, the author is a parasite sucking from the world’s body of evil.

Luckily there is a never-ending supply of evil. Don’t worry, boys and girls, there is enough out there for all of us.

What if the author was to tell a story about a small crew of professional killers whose weapons and ammo, tactics and strategic thinking were all provided for them by the all-time greatest professional hitman in Australian criminal history? It would be a very hard story to believe.

However, bear in mind two things. One is that the hitman is the author’s best, oldest and dearest friend and is also a great reader and lover of books.

The other is that a smart reader might notice that there has been a series of underworld murders in Australia that have coincided with the release of certain books.

It follows the same pattern. A month or so before the release of the author’s next book, or a month or so after, there would be a high profile underworld murder. There would be front page headlines about underworld wars and the Press would turn to the author for his comments. Each time there would be a mention of his latest books and the result would be seen in book sales.

He would make a killing … so to speak.

The theory is that a small crew of kids are recruited. They have been taught and trained by the very best and, like the very best, they will never be detected by police or the media because they don’t kill for profit or power. They kill for the thrill of the hunt. The sport. The game.

And now, let the story begin …

WHEN the crew of three first got together for their first hit in 1997 they were code-named the Young Americans. Fit, clean-cut, strong, good-looking and from well-to-do families. The right education at the right schools. The right family and social connections in banking, the stock market and computer science.

All of them made more money in their day jobs than the criminal world had to offer. Then cocaine entered the social lives of their friends and business associates.

They then realised that the faces who controlled this modern, up market cocaine trade were a new, American Express style of criminal yuppie – and all men backed by enemies and former enemies of the author. So the Young Americans got together. But how did they get started?

Easy.

They just wrote a letter to the author when he was in prison. The author replied with a phone number. It would change all their lives.

The Young Americans were then able to contact the most shadowy and, in the author’s opinion, the greatest hitman in Australia. Within a year, with the master blaster directing the play, the Beach Boys were formed.

They called themselves the Beach Boys because the three young men loved boating, surfing, jet skiing and general beach-going and, when not in Melbourne, lived a lot of the time on the Gold Coast. Their favourite song being the Beach Boys’
Let’s Go Surfing.
Naturally.

The code word over the phone for a killing was ‘Surf’s Up’ or ‘Let’s Go Surfing.’

Of course, no-one really goes out and kills anyone just to help a not-so-struggling author.

The Beach Boys, through their mentor and business manager, who, for the sake of the story, I will call Blue Eyes, take contracts from a wide range of people, for a wide range of reasons.

Perish the thought that the Beach Boys are killing everyone. Blue Eyes himself has his own orders to fulfil, so much so that in frustration over the phone he says things like, ‘Give us a rest, will ya? I can’t kill everyone!’ Ha! Ha! Ha!

However, the author was promised that enough murders would be carried out for the author, whom I won’t name for legal reasons, to fulfil his literary dream, a tenth book. So, dear readers, join me in yet another adventure into the world of crime. Or to put it another way – Surf’s Up!

Remember – the sheer fantastic is never believed. That is why it is so easy to carry out.

THE police receive all their information from criminals and, believe it or not, the media, which also gathers information from criminals and police. It’s like a ladies’ sewing circle, all swapping gossip.

I’m talking about matters strictly underworld. When a criminal identity is killed, it is not a matter the general public can help with, such as a missing person, a bank robbery, a rape, an abducted child or the murder of some poor little old lady.

A criminal killing is strictly in-house and any and all information has to come from the criminal world. However, knowing this also aids the thinking behind underworld murders in the form of disinformation.

If you fill the media and police full of shit prior to a professional killing and just after, you send both groups into an information spin-out.

Also, if you bring in a hit team from outside the mainstream criminal world, then the criminal world itself has to rely on the media or friendly police for ‘inside information’. In other words, no-one knows anything, but everyone is pretending to know everything.

It’s like a game of poker where you pretend to know when you don’t and pretend to be confident when you have no right to be.

Acting on information received from insiders who haven’t got the faintest idea themselves, media people tell police their secrets, police tell the media their secrets, all of which is based on bullshit from those who don’t know. But sometimes it is more sinister, where the disinformation is salted into the mine by those behind the hit in the first place.

I can think of 15 professional hits in Melbourne that will never be solved and both the police and the media are busy busting their guts trying to sort out the total shit they have been fed.

Many crimes are hard to commit and harder to conceal. But murder is easy if it’s handled correctly. Most murders are committed by people in the straight world. The wife has burned the bacon for the 10,000th time so you stab her in the breast bone. You spend $500,000 on home renovations and your idiot husband gets rounded corners on the granite benches and you hit him on the head with a meat tenderiser. Then what? No planning. The police come. You end up in a homicide interview room. You tell a few lies but your heart is not in it. You want to confess. You want the nice policeman to tell you that you’re not all that bad, that it wasn’t your fault. Then, the next thing you’re in the Dock at the Supreme Court and you’re in the bin for the next ten or 15 years. That’s how it works.

Even most murders involving crooks are the same. Cross words then a body. When the murders are planned, half the time they involve imbeciles. There was the one where they buried the body with lime – but it was the wrong type of lime. And even then the lazy buggers didn’t spread it around. They just chucked the bag in the hole.

When they found the body it was preserved and the bag of lime was still there – sitting on his chest.

There was also the case of the goose who killed a woman and put her in a drum of chemicals to dissolve the body. Good idea, except the chemical was a preservative. They found the body in mint condition (except she was dead).

I think the crook is now bottling pickled onions in jail, the stupid, fat Yank.

That is why homicide squads around Australia have clearance rates of around 90 per cent. Because most murderers are stupid and only marginally smarter than their victims – who must, of course, be stupider because they’re dead.

The disinformation must be in place before the gun is even loaded. It’s the heat of the moment killings that get solved and that men go to jail for. That, or big-mouth maggots bring themselves and their whole crew undone. Did anyone mention the Russell Street bombing and the Walsh Street murders?

The rule is that if you shut up and stay shut up, you won’t get locked up.

Here’s another tip from someone who knows. Stick to the story even if it is a fairy tale. Even if your fucking mother asks you to tell the real secret, whisper a lie into her ear because sticking with the story is as important as getting rid of the murder weapon.

This is a foolproof tactic because if you don’t stick to it you’re a fool for giving the police the proof to convict you. After a lifetime – some would say a life sentence – of watching other strategies fail, I’ve concluded this is the only tactic that works.

You might want to share some secrets with people close to you in the name of business or friendship, but you can never hand over the keys to your heart to anyone because they will surely stab you in it, even if they have to put the knife through your back to do it.

They will be unable to help themselves. Don’t you think that Clark Kent wanted to tell someone that he was really Superman? The answer is yes. The hardest thing to keep is a secret and the keepers of secrets are supermen, sometimes super bad men who will go to their graves with their headstones reading ‘Rest in Peace Clark Kent’.

People want to talk. The great crims are those who don’t need the reputation. Tough men don’t have to tell other people how tough they are. They know it and that’s all that matters. Beware the quiet man – he can be as deadly as he is rare.

Crims are like anyone else. They want to brag or confide to mates. But there is no such thing in the underworld as ‘mates’. The police have a network of informers who can’t wait to pass on any tidbits in exchange for the green light, a blind eye or a sling.

So if you tell the truth to anyone, you can go to jail. If you tell no-one you have no-one to betray you.

Stick with me, I’ve taken you to the beach but we haven’t gone surfing yet. Ha ha.

IN telling what is really going on, I am inviting you into a world of believe it or not. I could just be pulling your leg. I am, after all, a storyteller and this could just be another story. Just one more book of mischief written by a no-eared fool. But then you must ask yourself if the no-eared fool is telling lies all the time or just some of the time. And ask yourself how come none of these murders has ever been solved – and why is the storyteller so convinced that none of them ever will be?

Is the storyteller himself part of the original thinking behind the longest hit list in Australian criminal history? Good question. I’m glad you’ve asked. If so, is the storyteller a key player in the massive disinformation program that smoke screens the men behind it all? Could the storyteller himself be one of the men who helped to draw up the original death list? Good questions, all.

Sure, many of those who have died in the last few years have been enemies of the storyteller. Alphonse Gangitano, Mark Moran and others have died the most horrible and bloody deaths. Sure, I will not shed crocodile tears or alligator shoes for any of them.

Sure, their deaths have resulted in renewed interests in my books, CDs, films and assorted arms of Chopper Inc, but don’t think for a moment that I would assist in letting people leave this mortal place simply for profit and fun. Who do you think I am, some sort of psychopath?

No, no and no. Such a thought would simply be too fantastic to believe. Your legs are being pulled by the old leg puller. And remember, when I pull a leg, sometimes they just come off in my hands. At least, the toes do.

You’re so convinced I’m telling you a lie that you can’t wait to get to the next page. I’m either one of the best liars in Australia or one of the best storytellers. You be the judge – as long as you don’t sit in the Supreme Court.

LET’S go back to 1991 … three very old and close friends are sitting at a table in a back street hotel in Collingwood. Three very hated and feared men, they are – outcasts not just from normal everyday society but from a criminal world that neither wants nor trusts them.

Each of the three draws up his own personal hit list of 20 names. One man is to oversee the actual killings, the second to handle the funding and the third to control the disinformation that would smother the biggest death list ever put together in Australian criminal history. Sixty names.

The three men agree it would take years to complete the plan. There could not be wholesale slaughter or even the dimmest police and criminals would be able to see the three as the common denominator.

It was to be done so slowly that the police who began looking at the first murders would be retired before the list was complete. No-one would see the connection. You cannot follow the trail if it has grown over.

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold – and these three were nothing if not patient. They were prepared to let revenge freeze and thaw out before they were ready to act.

The team knew they would have to use other men to help, and, if needed, kill them to ensure they remained silent. Dead men tell no tales.

They knew it could take 15 to 20 years. Some would die from natural causes, others would die from the hands of other enemies, but the list would grow and overflow, and end up being 80 or even 100. To win a war you can’t have a time limit and you have to kill everybody and, naturally, over a 15 to 20 year period you find yourself planning the murders of men you hadn’t known when the list was drawn up.

As I write this, the list is 15 down with seven helpers put off as a side issue in the name of silence.

By the time I’ve finished writing this book there will have been 20 men crossed off the original list of 60, with maybe four to six more helpers having to go with them.

Then there will have a list of 40. Not too many really – you could put them all on one bus. Sixty sounds a bit hard to believe, but when you read this and learn that there is only 40 more to go it’s not such a fantastic tale to believe, after all.

I mean, some mental retard in Tasmania killed nearly 40 innocent people in one afternoon at Port Arthur in 1996, so 40 more murders in Australia over ten years isn’t such a way out thing. One difference being that the Port Arthur victims were decent citizens who didn’t deserve to die, whereas the ones on the Collingwood list all have it coming.