Chopper Unchopped (211 page)

Violence, or the threat of it, is the bullet. But the gun that directs the force is the psychology of fear.

No-one ever believed that the mass hysteria of a whole prison population could be caused by one man.

They were frightened of me yet, at the same time, not frightened. That is one of the greatest tricks. They know you are dangerous, but they don’t feel any personal danger, as I’ve always allowed the other fellow to have his ego and to feel superior to myself physically, yet inferior to me mentally.

As long as I allowed the other fellow his feeling of physical superiority, while maintaining his subconscious sense of mental and emotional inferiority, he would do what I wanted.

He would use his physical strength to get the approval of the man he believed was his mental superior.

It is not a perfect science and some of those I tried to control could turn on me. I’ve been attacked countless times but it was always my reaction afterwards that enabled me to turn an attacker into a friend.

I stabbed Alex and later we became allies. He turned on me and he became dead. I don’t know what Freud would think about it but his ink blots wouldn’t have mattered much inside H Division, although I must admit there was touch of what Sigmund called penis envy when I dropped my strides. The quickest way to analyse an inmate in there was to hit him in the head with a spade, an experiment allegedly performed by a large, no-eared man on one Richard Mladenich. But I digress.

It’s all very Dr B.F. Skinner, the Black Prince of the 20th century on the dark side of behavioural psychology. He carried out behavioural science tests on his own daughter, what we call mind games. She later took her own life, casting Skinner into the sin bin. However, his evil genius in relation to the study of mass psychology and behavioural science has been used by various governments during warfare.

The CIA used Skinner’s thinking during the middle and later stages of the Cold War. Make the other fellow doubt himself is the first rule and, since all persons are riddled with self doubt, Skinner’s psychological method for breaking down the emotional strength of the enemy was popular with the Cold War warriors. It’s like all great science, simple to put into practice – if you have the weapons.

Enough said, however, on B.F. Skinner. I spent 17 years reading his work. Do you think I am about to toss that sort of in-depth study into a paperback? A teacher asks the question, the student provides the answer. The fact that I have provided some answers for you doesn’t mean that I intend to provide them all. If I was to tell you all the secrets it would be like giving a loaded gun to a child. The consequences could be bloody.

I was big and tough, with a taste for violence and a capacity to take pain. But what made me different was that I was prepared to learn from history. While the others were watching the races, I was reading about the great generals and their battles. I was able to use their lessons in the Australian underworld.

I would smile and behave the fool but I would always remember what I had learned and use it against my enemies and, sometimes, my friends. You must remember that my enemies were often not that smart. Many of them thought the Battle of the Bulge was a fight in a strip club.

But I was just one of the biggest fish in a small septic pond. We were all dying by degrees. Many of my type were murdered, others died from their wounds, while others just rotted to become shadows of their former selves while in prison.

I retired, not to the front bar of some pub, but to the library where I began to write. It was not part of a master plan. We thought we might get one book out.

It became a best seller. Now this is the tenth, and I would suspect the last, book I will write. My life has been made into a movie. It is all unbelievable.

The truth is, I got away with murder in the underworld and I got away with murder in the literary world.

I look into the fire and wonder why. Then I remember I will have to clean up all the ash in the morning.

THERE are basically three sorts of crime. Unorganised Crime – lawless activity by individuals; Disorganised Crime – lawless activity by gangs; and Organised Crime – lawless activity by gangs, crews, teams, cartels, syndicates, call them what you will.

The Mafia is a continuing, never ending tree of criminal conspiracy to gain economic power via physical force and private corruption. It is kept alive with the falling leaf attitude. Each member is only a leaf, the roots of the tree are in place and so is the trunk. The leaves that do or don’t blow off (or get blown away) won’t affect the health of the tree itself. I’ve chainsawed big trees down and watched new suckers spring from the old tree’s original root system.

Any organised criminal group that has not been cut down within its first generation of life will never be cut down, as the root system after the first generation has taken hold. Any group who can trace its roots back 300 years or even 30 years is cemented in place.

Leaves may fall but the tree will remain. Any police or media remark to the contrary is flapdoodle, pure and simple. We should also remember that some police and the (very) odd journalist has been a member of a crime family or two.

I’m not saying that criminal activity is a myth or nonsense, it is all very real, dangerous and deadly serious, be it unorganised, disorganised or highly organised or spur of the moment thoughtless madness.

You are just as dead if you a shot by some idiot with a crime fantasy and a stolen .22 pea rifle as you are if blown away by a marksman hired by a crime cartel using a state of the art, high-powered sniper rifle that can take out a buffalo at two miles.

What I’m saying is that this psychology of fear is an important tool used at all levels of criminal activity and, one day, the crime fighters and people who report on crime will come to understand this tactic.

I feel at times the police and the various news media do to a certain degree understand the fear myth I’ve outlined and they themselves use this very tactic to frighten governments via the general public.

Budget funding relies heavily on public demand for more police to fight serious crime. The news media is not a public charity – the more the media can frighten the public the more newspapers they can sell and viewers they can attract. TV news and current affairs and crime documentaries rely heavily on this same psychology. The old Chinese proverb of killing one to scare ten thousand is very true and much used by all parties involved: cops, robbers, reporters and the humble spectator.

They shiver in fright and vote with their minds, hearts and wallets to protect themselves from a monster that is largely a phantom of disinformation.

People fear what they don’t understand and keeping the general public in a state of semi ignorance is an important tool in the battle plans of both the good guys and the bad guys.

We work together to keep the square-heads in the dark. Politicians win, because they get votes from being tough on crime, coppers win, because they get more money and influence, and the media wins because they have more stories to tell and sell. The crooks win, in a way, because they become more feared.

Know this and believe it because the bloke writing this has mastered and used this very tool for well over twenty years. For once, the humble reader is being invited to look behind a closely guarded and secret door only to find the monster is mostly imagination. It is all a Hollywood production.

There is no-one in the audience … we are all up on the stage.

AS always, my writing gets side tracked. Because the
Chopper
film is out, all I seem to be doing is giving radio, TV, newspaper and magazine interviews. The movie has already been sold to the Russians, Japanese and Poms, and the rest of the English-speaking world are raving about it.

Andrew Dominik, the director, has turned out to be a cross between Stanley Kubrick and Doctor Strangelove. Eric Bana is on his way up. The fact that he is so great in this movie is further proof that I am a genius. I must modestly confirm the story others have told that I was the one who originally picked him for the role. They were talking about Russell Crowe at the time, but I couldn’t understand why. He may have been a good Fitzroy ruckman, but as an actor I think he is fairly average.

I always thought Eric had what it took to do the business. After all, he comes from the northern suburbs, too, and can talk the talk. And he’s got a sense of humour, and can tell a yarn, which is more than of these other poofy actors can. Anybody who wants to argue with my theory should look at Billy Connolly’s film roles.

Then there were the offers from the BBC to do a documentary and requests from artists to sit for them for the Archibald Prize art contest. I’ve knocked back a list of wombats, including one offer involving serious money, to star in an Australian-made porn movie. They always said I was a tosser, but I didn’t want to prove it.

Marriage and a young son bring with it certain rules and moral regulations, but fame, if you can call it that, does bring with it an odd sort of power and influence.

I had written two films scripts in Risdon Prison, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘The Band Played On.’ I sent them off to the usual suspects, movie and TV people in Australia. Tait Brady at Palace films, Michele Bennett, Andrew Dominik and various TV people.

I thought for fun that I’d send one of each to my friend Sam Risovich in Reno, Nevada. Within a week Sam rang me and said, ‘Hey Chopper, where do I send the money?’

My books are popular on the black market in various parts of America and they had the video of the movie in Reno before it was released in Australia.

It was only my intervention that prevented the whole movie being downloaded onto the internet, something to do with an m-peg file, whatever that is.

I would like to see my film scripts – or at least one of them – on the big screen in Australia.

Everything is done in a hurry in America. The cash is arranged within days and they want to know when you plan to start production.

When I said to Sam that it would take at least two years and explained that the Australian movie took nearly eight years to get off the ground he nearly dropped the phone. But, like my books, producing a movie using one of my own scripts will happen, in spite of my critics.

As they say in Sicily, ‘The Devil has a bank book too.’ I won’t explain the meaning of that proverb to you.

Figure it out for yourself.

SOMETIMES I am amazed at the name ‘Chopper Read’. I can talk to people I don’t know and say it’s Mark Read, and it’s all very ho hum, but when I say ‘Chopper’ it’s a different matter. I went to the Men’s Gallery nightclub to empty out my pool table on a Friday lunchtime and met a young blonde, all tits and legs, blow-up doll dancer named Shelley Hamilton-Smith. Just a 19-year-old cute kid who mentioned that one day she’d like to be a photographic model.

I rang Dave Lornie, the editor of
100% Home Girls
magazine and, bingo bango, Miss Hamilton-Smith is a photographic model. Sometimes it’s nice to be nice and being Chopper Read don’t mean that you have to hurt everyone you come into contact with. These days I find myself doing more good turns for people than bad turns. It’s a nice feeling to help someone out.

Maybe being a dad has mellowed me, I don’t know. I guess I’m trying to be a better person. That doesn’t mean I’m no longer the man I was. I will always remain that man.

The leopard doesn’t change his spots, but he does get older and he does grow tired and slower. Kindness is still treated as a weakness, human nature hasn’t changed that much but I’ve dropped my guard a hell of a lot.

I guess Mary Ann and little Charlie have done that for me. I don’t want to go all mushy but it’s true. Renee Brack from Showboat Productions wants to do another interview with me. The one she did for Hard Copy in 1991 and the stories and rumours surrounding that weekend nearly destroyed her TV career.

She made an appearance in the movie, Renee Brack as herself, only after Michele Bennett rang and asked me if I didn’t mind. People get me all wrong. They sting me, I sting them back but I don’t take it personally.

Business is business, sometimes it’s in people’s business or career interest to dump on me. I will survive, I will come back, and I always do so. Name three of Beethoven’s critics – it’s a very true saying. I’m expecting Elle McFeast to ring next. I’m not expecting a call from Alan Jones – not unless he wants to spend a penny. Life is funny, I’m writing a tenth book and trying to work out how I can make a movie as well while doing a third CD with Colin Dix, in between changing nappies and helping with Charlie.

At times it can be quite surreal. Thank God that I’ve been living on a farm, although nobody can be sure how long that will last for me. I have found that the farm injects normality into an otherwise insane world.

I’ve now got quite a list of bimbo TV reporters who have lost their jobs with this or that network contacting me regarding doing a TV documentary.

Of course, I’m a retard and I swallow it hook, line and sinker. The trick is to get me to say yes and then they run away screaming that they have me nailed down for an interview. They then try and squeeze 25 or 30 grand out of one of the networks for this so-called, in-depth documentary.

I had this one lady say to me that she is having dinner and drinks with some big deal network yuppie. All she had to do was argue the price with him. Strangely enough, she said, ‘He’s the same arsehole who sacked me several years ago.’ I listened in silence then said, ‘Do you reckon you can pull it off?’

She laughed and said, ‘I think I’ll have to do a fucking bit more than pull him off, Chopper.’

I wasn’t making a sexual jest or pun but this chick is the sort that jumps on every turn of phrase and comes back with a sexual jest. It was like having a telephone conversation with a dial a dirty phone call sex number. She purrs over the phone.

How am I meant to take it with TV chicks who say it straight out to me, ‘I know you’re a married man now with a wife and baby boy, but Jesus, Chopper, if you could agree to this I’d promise you more than a few bob in a brown paper bag. I won’t beg but I will get on my knees and while I’m down there I’ll blow your ears off.’

They forget, of course, that my ears have already been blown off. So there is no way I can respond to their kind but misguided offers.

I think there is a whole underclass TV world of former TV girls who got the sack because they got a year too old or wouldn’t blow the boss and are now willing to do anything if it puts some wind back into their sails.

Frank Sinatra was right when he called some of the media people whores and thieves. I’ve met more foul-mouthed, cock-teasing whores, sluts and low life molls in TV land than in any brothel. I used to be innocent in these matters, but I got a rude shock. It’s not a case of will they suck, it’s a case of have you got a drivers licence, Chopper?

‘Yes,’ I replied to one lady. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because I can’t give you head if I’m driving,’ she answered.

I must admit there was some logic in that and I had to do what I could to keep the road toll down. Of course, all their deals fall through and the sexy phone calls stop.

But if you told a donkey about some of these TV, pay TV and cable TV ladies he would kick you in the head for telling lies. The stories are true, but so hard to believe Linda Lovelace wouldn’t swallow them. Ha ha.