Chopper Unchopped (209 page)

They get on the phone to their own police and media contacts and within two days, my police and media contacts are telling me of a whole new line of investigation. I back down and reply, ‘Gee, I was sure my information was correct.’ They put the phone down, smugly thinking that fucking Read isn’t the fucking know it all he thinks he is. I put the phone down and simply smile. Gotcha! Ha, ha, ha!

Media and police rely on information received. All you have to do is create the information they receive, then control it and never rely on one story. Always give them several sources, then allow them to select the most tasty piece of flapdoodle from the menu. Never force feed them, allow them the pleasure of a la carte. If they pick their own they will believe it more.

I know of several investigations, still unsolved, where police scientific investigators mistook a gunshot wound from a .22-calibre magnum handgun as that of a 38-calibre.

The slug passed straight through the body and was never found, so the whole homicide squad is busy, busy, busy sorting out the disinformation on murders they will never solve, beginning with scientific evidence, sending the investigators in search of the wrong weapon. How do I know that? Maybe I made it up, or maybe I know the killer. Maybe I know the killer very well.

I won’t start on police scientific investigators. Remember the Azaria Chamberlain case. Blood spots, which turned out to be paint spots when they enter the courtroom. It’s a nice trip up the yellow brick road.

Scientific evidence doesn’t have to be 100 per cent spot on anymore. The introduction of DNA evidence means that all that is needed now is to be pretty close, not 100 per cent. But a fair chance and that’s that, you’re guilty. Add that crap to police evidence based on several years of disinformation along with police ballistic experts who can’t tell a 22-calibre magnum head wound from the head wound of a .38. I can think of several fellows, although very guilty of a hundred other unsolved crimes, who didn’t do the ones they are in prison for. Quite comic really, in a poetic justice sort of way. Life all seems to equal itself out in the end. Just ask Alphonse. His equalled itself out a little earlier than he’d hoped. Never mind, if he believed in reincarnation, perhaps he’ll get a longer tour of duty next time.

But I’m getting off the track.

Remember Victor Frederick Allard, a former painter and docker turned drug dealer? He was shot to death in February, 1979, in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. And Michael Ebert, who was shot to death on 17th April, 1980, outside a brothel in Rathdowne Street, Carlton? Both unsolved. Police and media all think they know the answer but if they know so fucking much then how come no arrests or convictions?

Did Shane Goodfellow really die of a drug overdose in 1992 or was it a hotshot murder? The same with Tony MacNamara – but, again, I digress. I tend to do this. The reader must forgive me.

Trying to write a book while stopping my 10-month-old baby son, Charlie, from smashing the remote control from the TV over the cat’s head, tends to distract one’s Thomas-the-Tank Engine of thought. Charlie is, as I said, 10 months old at the time of writing and two stone in weight, with four teeth already and walking, albeit with help. He enjoys chewing the skin off raw potatoes. As you do.

Anyway, I have to put the pen down to change Charlie’s nappy. From murder to nappies, life has indeed taken me on some strange twists and turns. Although, looking at it, I think he has committed GBH of the bottom. As often happens, I sit down to write thinking that I’m heading in a certain direction, only to find I have begun a literary U-turn. This, I guess, is my style. It was the same when I was full time in the underworld. I might pop around to someone’s place for a drink, then decide to shoot them in the guts or just burn their house down. Poor old Nick the Greek still whinges about that. He should remember that without me he would have been just another no-name drug dealer. With my help, free of charge, he ended up in the
Chopper
movie and is world famous. God help us all.

The fact that no-one knew whether I was coming around for a drink (as in Victoria Bitter) or coming around for a ‘drink’ (as in a sling) always added a tingle to your underworld social event. Will I have a Harvey Wallbanger, or just grab Harvey and bang him into the wall? These were the sort of questions which kept everyone interested in the social whirl.

There is much that I miss about the old days. The torture, the blood, the look in a drug dealers’ eyes over those few hours it takes them to remember where the stash is. The look of fear as they know there will be pain, the look of anger as they know they will lose their cash, the look of hope when they think that will be enough, the look of resignation as they hop in the boot and the look for their mother when they see the lime and the spade.

You could write a book about it, except I already have.

‘Mentally speaking, it’s pretty hard to pull your socks up when you’re only wearing fucking thongs.’
– Frankie Waghorn, H Division legend and the hardest puncher in the underworld.

I’M not the only one to use the psychology of fear or to weave a web of disinformation to conceal the truth.

Take the case of Santo Ippolito in December, 1991. Santo was bashed to death in his home in Springvale. Case unsolved. Disinformation claimed within underworld circles that a member of my crew hired through me was paid to do it. I’ve never heard of the bloke in my life. And if I did I wouldn’t tell you. I didn’t get all this way to lag myself back into jail. Twenty-four years is enough for anyone.

The case of Vietnamese drug dealer Quock Cuong Dwong, killed on 30th January, 1992. Story put about it was a torture job again. Again, baseless rumours that members of my old crew were close to the scene. There was even one yarn that had me actually involved. Again, never heard of the bloke. I am offended by these slanders against me.

But the best was when the dagos killed Rocco Medici and his brother Giuseppe Furina and dumped them in the Murrumbidgee River after cutting their ears off. I’m unsure of the date, but it was back in the eighties and it may have been 5 May, 1984, at a spooky guess.

It was during the height of the Pentridge overcoat gang war and a membership drive of the Van Gogh club, which is far more exclusive than the Melbourne club. Members of my crew, on the outside, were rumoured to have been paid by the Italians to carry out the murders, and the ears was a comic touch. A sort of Van Gogh signature.

In all of the history of the Italian criminal culture, ear cutting has never been a part of the play. That bit of disinformation lasted about two days until a few wogs were told that the next lot of ears to come off would be their own. End of disinformation program, but they are still unsolved murders.

And, now, if I may quote myself from an earlier work regarding these matters:

‘If you have a dead body in the bottom of your swimming pool and the police are on their way over to interview you about a missing wristwatch, then the only thing you can do is toss dirt into the pool and muddy the water. What people can’t see they won’t worry about. The police may remark on your dirty swimming pool but for the time being, that’s it until the next move, which is hopefully out of the fucking swimming pool.’

To which I would add a thought from Sherlock Holmes:

‘Ninety per cent of all criminal cases solved are the direct result of information received. The remaining 10 per cent belong to the investigating criminal detective and nine per cent of those cases are bungled by forensic fools. The impossible one per cent are totally unsolvable. The per cent remaining is then handed to us, my dear Watson.’

MANY years ago, around 1969, in the midst of street fights and teenage gang trouble in Thomastown, I had taken to covert action against my enemy. Rocks through windows at night. A petrol can and a box of matches left at a front door step. A .22 calibre slug from a bolt-action rifle through the front door at night. Death threat phone calls. Turning their power off at night. Home-made fire bombs tossed at front doors. In several cases I burnt down their outside Thunderbox dunny toilets. I’d slash the tyres on the family car. Put bricks through the windscreen. In several cases I’d poison the family dog.

Generally, I was a 15-year-old arsehole, and to top it off I started to spread rumours that these covert activities were being carried out by three criminal brothers, Nick, Paul and Rocco Shachini. The rumours spread over the years. I would hear that this or that unsolved murder or shooting was carried out by the brothers.

When I first met Mad Charlie, he had heard the feared reputation of the shadowy brothers and was impressed that I knew them. Alphonse Gangitano claimed to actually know the fabulous Shachini brothers.

Personally, I stopped telling wild Shachini brother stories in about 1975, but it was too late – the imaginary Shachinis had taken on a life all of their own in the form of a Sicilian Mafia family from Thomastown who secretly controlled Italian criminal concerns throughout the northern suburbs in the eighties.

I was often asked if I knew them or had heard of them, by men claiming to know them and to be criminally involved with them. I then would reply that, like others, I’d heard of them but had never met them.

It had long been forgotten by the teenage kids of years ago that Chopper Read was the first one ever to mention the Shachini Brothers.

In 1987, an old Italian man who I will call Poppa Tony told me that the former NSW vice king, Maltese Joe Borg, was blown to death in his car in 1969 on the orders of the Shachini brothers. Poppa Tony wasn’t lying – he was repeating a story he believed to be true.

The Shachini brothers were also rumoured to have disposed of the mortal remains of anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay. And rumoured to be the private hit squad behind the international drug king, Howard Marks. The name of the three brothers has now run its natural race and they are only spoken of in whispers by old men and men who are desperate to find the answer to an unsolvable riddle.

But, for a time, this invented myth played a large role in my own disinformation campaigns and helped to create my own personal method of tactical and strategic gang warfare, which I would later call my ‘psychology of fear’ theory. I would refine it over the years but what I learned when I was 15 was to become the biggest plank of my methods – and many a crook would be forced to walk it before I was done.

It wasn’t courage or bravery that made me disregard most of what I heard from criminals, media and police regarding rumoured death contracts on my own life. Fact was, various times I was told the contracts had been ordered by the great Shachini brothers themselves. I mean, the whole criminal world was a mishmash of bullshit with a dead body or two tossed in the pot now and again to add weight to the raging river of lies. Was it any wonder that no one could stop me from laughing. I wasn’t mad, I just knew the truth, a truth that no one would ever believe.

As a master of propaganda, I could pick a disinformation campaign from a distance. Don’t kid a kidder and don’t bullshit a killer. Most of these stories I knew were fairy tales and those that weren’t … well, sometimes spin doctors weren’t enough. Sometimes, real bullets were needed.

Why is it so? Because some nitwit has put it in writing and told you it is so. Read the Bible, then tell me that people can’t be tricked by disinformation. People believe what they want to believe. In the criminal world the only trick is to come up with disinformation that the crims, media and police can all agree on. That’s why the poor old general public has done more bulk swallowing than Linda Lovelace. A book on true crime – I doubt that such a book has ever been written, in the history of man. The closest would be the most excellent
Underbelly
series which I keep on my bedside table for night-time reading.

We are now surfing in a sea of disinformation. It’s night time and we can’t see the sky or the beach. We are just surfing in the direction that the waves are taking us. We are all surfing on a lie. The only truth is, if we fall in we die.

Are you beginning to understand the world I’m trying to take you to? What the media, police, writers and movie directors call the underworld. The logic is to ignore logic. You have to unlearn what you have been taught.

That is why people, including police, never truly understand the underworld. They think too much. They start by saying, ‘If I was the crook I would have done this.’ They give most crooks too much credit for planning and logic. Dennis Allen shot a bloke for putting the wrong record on in his lounge room. Work that out – he would have been a shocking DJ.

We had a war in jail because I was alleged to have eaten too many sausages, a foul piece of slander indeed – although I must say they were yummy.

Nothing makes sense and when you understand that, everything falls into place. There is no logic in shooting someone outside a crowded nightclub, cutting your ears off and baseball batting various fat wombats in front of witnesses.

There is no master plan, just a sea of human filth trying to get to the surface for a breath of pure air. I have known of crims on their way to a million-dollar heroin deal who have shoplifted a coat on the way. If they had been caught, the deal would have gone sour. Why did they do it? Because they could.

End of story, or rather, just the beginning. Are you getting the picture? Do you want me to draw a map? You’re in Northern Ireland and a man walks up to you in the dark and puts a loaded gun to your head. He pulls the hammer back and asks, ‘What religion are you?’ You have but a few seconds to reply or die, and the wrong reply will kill you. To reply and prevent the gunman from killing you, then to make him puzzle and think and look and ask questions, allowing you precious seconds to somersault the whole situation. It is the trick and the trick is disinformation.

How would you reply? I’ve spent most of my life, not only replying in the correct manner, but walking away with the gunman’s weapon and him convinced that he was lucky to get out of the situation with his life. That, my dear reader, is the psychology of fear. Master that and you can master the world. It is bluff, backed by a baby .410 shotgun and an army of psychopaths. The art is looking to be out of control when you are very much in control.

You’re still surfing in the dark, aren’t you? Let’s hope that when you get to the last page, you will see the sunlight. I will have to expose myself, and after nine best sellers, three music CDs and a movie made about my life, a sunglass contract and an international profile, it may be time to expose the real me.

Or not.

What do I care. I’ve won the game and in telling you, even in a small way, how I did it will not be considered bragging, I would hope. A magician is not a liar or a conman. He has just made you believe that what you didn’t see really did happen and what you really did see didn’t happen at all. If he can make you laugh at the same time you belong to him for he has, for a moment, captured your imagination. I am the magician who doesn’t pull a rabbit from his hat but a pistol from his underpants.

Many years ago a very well-known radio type, later to become a TV personality, was debating the rape issue on talkback radio with a high profile lady in the women’s movement. She stopped him dead by saying, ‘Well, it’s a waste of my time debating this point with you. You have never been raped – I have.’

The next day, the radio personality, shocked his listeners by breaking down and tearfully confessing that he had been the victim of sexual molestation as a child at the hands of his uncle. Game, set and match to him. He had not only won the debate but gained the sympathy of a whole new audience.

The only evidence that what he said was true was his own word. But why would a man say such a thing if it weren’t true? Why indeed! Think of the psychological advantage. Another famous personality comes out and confesses to being homosexual, then writes a best seller on the topic. The truth was he was really straight and just pretending to be gay.

How many famous American TV and movie personalities have broken down in tears on national television with stories like ‘daddy played with my rubber duckie in the bath when I was six and my mother held me at gun point while he did it’? There are too many to count.

It all comes back to what Hitler said about people always believing a really big lie. Chopper Read comes out and tells people he has murdered nineteen people and bang, he’s a psycho killer overnight.

No one stops to say hang on, hang on, let’s have a look at this. Some half-retarded moll says she is the mother of Mick Jagger’s love child and bingo! That’s that. Elvis Presley isn’t really dead. Adolf Hitler was seen sunning himself outside a cafe in Argentina in 1967. Lee Harvey Oswald really did shoot Kennedy.

Did they really put a man on the moon or was it a CIA, White House, Hollywood con trick to kid the world and the USSR that the Americans did it?

Okay, okay, that’s a bit far fetched – although it wouldn’t surprise me if Dave the Jew was the first man on the moon – or shot the bloke who was.

What I am getting at is we believe most of what we are told or what we read or see on the six o’clock news. It is human nature to want to believe that we are hearing and reading. If we do not believe what we are told what have we got left? What fills the void?

We all know politicians are liars, yet we not only vote them into office, we pay them a lot of money and we believe what they tell us while knowing all the time that most of them can’t be trusted.

What does that tell us about human nature? For Christ’s sake, I’m probably the greatest liar and disseminator of disinformation in Australian criminal history. Let’s face it, I’m a raving bullshit artist but I can make people laugh while telling them a lie and, psychologically, if a person is laughing while listening to a story or reading a story, then he or she is subconsciously believing the story. You can’t shoot me when you’re laughing, but I am the master of the side-splitting joke. Literally.

Yes, I have shot a few and a few have died – big deal. But, in reality, Chopper Read was a less than average criminal who used greater than average violence for less than average money. But Chopper Read could spin a greater than above average story and he could get people laughing. I’m a self-made man with an unmade face and an unfilled grave. It has now reached the stage that fact can no longer be separated from fiction.

That’s what a true legend is. A legend is a myth. It is a lie welded together with the truth and used as a cosh to beat the unsuspecting around the head. I’ve done it and now I’m telling you, believe nothing except what you yourself believe to be true while all the time being aware that you could be wrong.

I will take a little mental rest now. My doctor warned me not to get into these spinouts as I start to waffle and I suspect I’m starting to rave a little. Then again, sometimes the truth of a situation can be clearly seen only after talking to a total mental case.

I must go and find one.

A MATE of mine, Shane Farmer, a local nightclub owner, once said to me, ‘Chopper, you have created a legend and built yourself into a national celebrity and now you want to come back and write a book and tell everyone it is all bullshit. Why?’

No, I don’t, my point is, that it could all be bullshit. For example, take Dave the Jew. Until I made mention of him in my first book, no one had ever heard of him. Now he is being blamed for unsolved murders all over Melbourne. They even questioned him over the death of Alphonse.

Yes, I know a bloke named Dave and, yes, he is a Jew, but I created his reputation and I created a legend.

Was it all fact or fantasy? Only I will ever know. Dave and me, that is. Now the legend of Dave the Jew, thanks to me, has taken on a life all of its own. This is my point, it’s not hard to create a myth or a legend or give a totally unknown a feared reputation, then to step back and watch your own creation take on a life all of its own. Criminals are by nature all liars. Police run a close second and the media outdo the both of us, so how can the general public believe a single word?

That is what I’m trying to say. Who created Chopper Read? Well, first of all, I did it myself with some big help of the police. Then, of course, the media got in for its chop, if you know what I mean. Chopper Read’s image is largely a media-created package. A virtual reality, multi-media package with no ears and a heap of tattoos, tied up in a bow.

But I wrapped the package for them, handed it to the police and we together handed it to the media. Dave the Jew – I could kill him off in the third page of my next book and the real Dave could scream to the wind. As far as the police, media and general public would be concerned, the Jew would be dead.

That’s how easy it is to build a legend, then to kill one off. It’s like writing characters in and out of television scripts, except that it’s real life. I plant the seed, I can chop the tree. Within the criminal world, the lie is everything. The gun is only a tool used to support the lie – once you understand that you begin to understand the insane psychology of it all.

Chopper Read is who and what you think he is because he told you he is. Others have confirmed my reality because I told them it was so. Maybe I don’t exist at all. How many of you have seen me in the flesh? Only a few dozen people of the hundreds of thousands who have read the books and seen the movie.

They made the movie about my life based on what I wrote. Okay, the movie is pretty well true – a few murders, a shooting or two and a bit of a huff and puff, but hardly the stuff legends are built on.

But if I can do it, what about the truth of other legends? What about reputations. Is it all just a lie? No, of course it isn’t, but for all that, in the criminal world the lie is vital. It is the glue that holds it all together.