Chopper Unchopped (214 page)

Altogether, Great Uncle Eammon was possibly the greatest arsehole the Read clan has, or will ever produce, which is no mean feat. Instead of hiding him away in the family skeleton cupboard, I’d like to bring him out and dust him off and say with pride, ‘Great Uncle Eammon, I salute you’. My dad always told me that the Read clan boasted worse arseholes than his boy Chopper.

WHAT sort of dad would I be if I didn’t include a photo of my son Charles Vincent, little Chop Chop? My old mate Doug Young gave Charlie a toy wooden hammer. A nice thought, however, with child safety in mind I went out and bought a second hand 240GL Volvo and Charlie would sit in the back in his booster safety seat and proceed to bang the hammer against the window.

The oven door had already been given a damn good seeing to along with the two cats, Poop Foot and Ernie, and our two dogs, Little Bill and Patsy Cline.

The hammer caper was getting quite out of hand for a while there. Charlie is a strong kid for a mere 13 months of age. As I write this he has six teeth and is quite a size and weight. He can pick up a solid iron fire poker that weighs about 2.5 kilos with one hand and swing it about the kitchen, laughing his head off.

The dogs run for cover and I have to disarm Charlie and say ‘No Charlie, no poker’. Charlie looks at me, laughs and runs for his little wooden hammer and while daddy isn’t looking, WHACK, he lets me have a rather hefty blow to the knee cap. Don’t tell me knee-capping runs in the family.

So into the fire the hammer went. He looks up towards his official Tee Ball baseball bat that hangs from the kitchen ceiling, laughs, then runs off. All Charlie seems to do is eat and laugh, when he’s not bashing me up.

He likes to begin breakfast with a bloody great bowl of custard and Weet-Bix all mashed up with toast and vegemite. He has six teeth (which is two more than me) and munches away on the toast until his whole face covered in vegemite.

The dogs look on, waiting for Charlie to drop his toast, but at 13 months he can read their minds. It’s Charlie’s toast and no one else’s except, of course, if Charlie’s attention is drawn to Mary Ann opening up his tin of custard and pulling out the Weet-Bix, then Charlie stands transfixed, watching the main event being prepared.

While this is going on, Little Bill comes from out of hiding and creeps over and gently snatches the toast from Charlie’s hand and then the fun begins. We had to hang Charlie’s plastic baseball bat up as well. I won’t continue, as I will start to sound like one of them proud dads who thinks every move his son makes is brilliant. Plus the RSPCA may not be happy to know what a little Read can do to a dog he suspects of illegal use of his vegemite toast.

It’s good being a dad and I must say that when Charlie was born it changed my whole life. Strange words coming from a man with my reputation. Hard to believe, I know. I just hope we can make it last.

I hope that because I have come to this so late in life I am able to understand it more. I have seen more violence than most men who have not been to war. I have planned the death and destruction of my enemies. I have inflicted great pain on people and then gone off for eight hours sleep. I have cut off people’s toes and then had a feed of fish fingers. Yummy. I have had people cry and beg for help. And that is only my book editors, who have been reduced to gibbering wrecks. The reason I was feared in the underworld was that I had no fear. There were men who were stronger than me, but none were as dangerous. I was not frightened to die and my enemies knew that.

They had more troops, more guns and more money, but they were frightened to fight because they couldn’t afford to lose.

I didn’t care if I lived or died, so I was the most dangerous of all.

Like a wolverine, which is a small animal, but nothing in nature will mess with it because it has no fear. Polar bears won’t take it on.

I made a decision never to marry or have children while I was at war. I would not have a weak spot that my enemies could exploit. A family man was a dead man in the crime world. You could always get at him through his family.

When I met Mary Ann I had already retired from crime. To go from the fog of my former life to a new start was something I didn’t believe could ever happen.

The only sad thing for my son is that his dad will always be remembered for the things he once did and the man he once was. Forgetting that all of us used to be someone else who did other things than they do today, once upon a time. The cross that I carry is that until my dying day and beyond I will always be seen as the man I once was and what came later will mean nothing compared to that. We all have a cross to carry – mine is that I used to be Chopper Read.

I can put the Chopper Read mask on when I need to. It entertains some and shocks others. But it is like putting on a uniform to go to work. I take it off when I get home to my family.

To the world I am a mad killer. To Charlie, I am just Daddy.

It is a burden he will also have to carry one day. When I go to parent teacher nights, will the others see me as a dad or as a monster?

Will parents let their kids come and play here, knowing I am the responsible adult looking after them?

The truth is, I can look after kids because I know all the dangers in the world and then some.

I worry for Charlie. Everywhere he goes he will be Chopper’s son and will not be able to hide. I am covered with tattoos, have no ears and am now known around the world. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind the infamy but I worry that my son will have to live with the costs.

In the underworld I lived through the wars, got my scars and lived. My enemies are dead or hiding. They are in jail or have become pathetic junkies. They hate the fact that many of them are unknown by the world while Chopper Read is famous. But will Charlie learn to hate the name the way so many others have over the years?

FRIENDS of mine from Melbourne have told me to expect a new wave of murders. At least three, including at least one with a Moran influence to it. However, my continued book writing conflicts with the inside info I now receive.

For example I know that a few jockeys may have put the ‘mocker’ on themselves by being too close to a few crooks. Loose lips sink ships and favourites. See if I’m right.

As all concerned know that whatever I’m told is written down they know I won’t betray their trust, but a certain resentment has built up. I won’t visit Melbourne when invited to birthday parties, weddings, funerals and general get togethers. Too public.

My own death would be a major score. I know that if I was shot dead book sales would go through the roof, so if I am gunned down in a hail of bullets I would like to announce that my publishers should be put on the top of any suspect list.

I’m sad to say that the only people with any real chance of killing me are, in fact, my own friends. They are also the only people with anything to gain. A former criminal turned author with inside knowledge on certain people dating back 30 years is, to put it ever so politely, a major security risk.

The irony is that I am far more dangerous with a pen than a gun. As an author, I have always walked a fine line. I have told enough to let the world know what the crime world is really like. But no-one has done any jail time from my nine books. Luckily, it is not a criminal offence to mix metaphors, strangle grammar and butcher punctuation, or I’d be back inside.

Because this could and probably will be my last book, I know that some crims, particularly friends, will be worried that I will make it a tell all. I know where the bodies are buried – literally. I could drop bombshell after bombshell. I could have the homicide squad out with sniffer dogs and shovels. They would dig up everyone short of Elvis.

Many would like to spill my guts before I spilled them myself.

Some insiders see me as a criminal historian and they ring me with information. They want to know if they die that someone will be able to record what really happened.

They tell me what has happened and what will happen. Some of it is just rumour and theory. But it is amazing how much of it turns out to be true. I must also consider that I am being fed disinformation, although I do check and counter check any and all inside information.

I don’t need the CIA computer to analyse what is going on. I can smell death and the pong is coming over Bass Strait right now.

I will sit here and play with my son. Sooner or later the phone will ring and it will be a friend or a reporter to tell me of the latest murder. Before he gives me the name I will write down on a pad the name of the dearly departed.

I will know who it is before his name has been officially released. I could ring people now and tell them they will be dead within months. They would see it as a threat. If the police were to find out then I would end up on the suspect list. No, better not to interfere.

I will watch and wait. I see the names of some crooks in the papers. I wonder if they know they are dead men walking.

Some of them don’t know that their best friends are plotting their deaths. Have another short black, fellas. It is much later than you think.

I am now, however, no longer an active part of the life and the world that my old friends come from and still inhabit. Sentimental for old time’s sake friendships can only go so far and I now must face the fact that these friends now view me as an outsider even though I helped to create some of the main players still involved.

Why should I continue to be given the before-it-happens information, simply to help me write a book?

I haven’t lost the ability to see into the minds and hearts of old friends. I can read the play too well and now I know that my once-upon-a-time best friend would, if I placed myself into his hands, kill me.

He won’t visit Tasmania because he rightly suspects that I’ve seen behind the smiling face and if he visited Tasmania I’d have to do him in. It would give me no pleasure. It would be self defence.

Yet, in the face of this discomfort he still tells me things. I’ve sworn that if he dies before me I will write his true life story. His ego is so great that he must keep me informed, to a certain degree, so that if he gets either arrested or shot dead I will be the one to write his story.

That is the example of the sheer insanity of the world I write about. I write about it and the world that I once came from. It is also a situation so impossible to believe that, as the CIA used to say, ‘We have believable denial on our side.’

Deniability … I can tell a true story so crazy that the reader simply will not believe it to be true. If you enter into a truth that no-one will ever believe you are protected by logic, as logic tells whoever reads or hears the story that it simply isn’t true.

Don’t believe it? Then think about this. After all I have done, I have never been convicted of murder. If you can use logic as a weapon to protect yourself it is the best alibi you can have.

Believable deniability – that means, naturally, that the CIA had nothing to do with the Kennedy shooting. We all suspect they might have known a little more than the history books tell us, but we all deny they did it. This is what I write about – a truth so fantastic that it simply is not believed. I’m protected by the sheer insanity of a totally unbelievable truth. My friends are the people who really want to kill me and the truth they tell me is protected by the fact that no-one believes it until after it happens and even then they still can’t bear to face reality.

You’re reading this and probably don’t fully understand what I’m telling you. You sort of do but logic tells you it’s all a lie but you are sort of wondering if it could all be true.

Magic, isn’t it? Pure insane magic. When the truth shrouds itself in a cloak of lies it can walk among us totally unseen. Protected by the logic of believable deniability.

As my pen travels across the pages I find myself moving further and further away from my original topic. The BBC interviewed me today. Newspapers and magazines in England have interviewed me. Miss Suzanne Soul, the cute little artist, has contacted newspapers about entering my portrait in the Archibald Prize art competition.

Miss Shelley Hamilton-Smith, the all tits and legs young blonde dancer, grateful that I talked Dave Lornie, the editor of
100% Home Girls
magazine into using her as a centrefold, has invited me to her engagement party.

A strange way to say thanks, mate, I must say.

I’m being heavily pressured to actually make a movie based on one of the two film scripts I wrote. For Christ’s sake, people in Reno, Nevada, are buying shares in the film script.

I don’t have the faintest idea how to make a movie but it looks like I’m going to have to give it a try. I might start with a small documentary first. You don’t need a lot of brains to make a documentary, all you have to do is interview a goodly handful of mental cases and Bob’s your uncle. Considering that I’d interview active and retired hitmen I could call the documentary ‘Bob’s Your Dead Uncle.’

I used to collect the money out of the pool table in the Crown Bar at Shane Farmer’s Men’s Gallery nightclub but I got sick of signing autographs for drunks whenever I went in.

The real reason I gave it away was that I don’t like people knowing my movements and arriving every Friday about midday to collect the money was an obvious risk. As a man who spent half a lifetime working out the movements of my enemies, I was not going to give them the same chance.

I was only making $100 a week and it wasn’t worth the headache. The arrangement was I’d handle public relations for his various business interests, nightclubs and so on for a regular sling. Public relations at times also included security. The truth is, I would rather shoot a loud-mouthed drunk than jolly him out of the building. In the end, none of it was worth the sheer pest value of the whole comedy of errors.

Friendship should never be mixed with money or business, not with me. I take people at their word and if I feel I’m being shortchanged I have an overwhelming urge to shoot whoever I feel is shortchanging me and as a dad I can no longer do that sort of shit. Left to myself, I would rather deal with these matters at the Coroner’s Court than the Bankruptcy Court. But I’m not by myself, so it’s best to be friends and not worry about involving myself in other people’s business affairs. The fact that everyone I know seems to drop my name with every second sentence they utter is just part of the cross I carry. I just have to live with it. That’s life. Sure beats the alternative. I must say as was pointed out to me by my wife, I wouldn’t be mixing with the people I mix with today if Mad Charlie was still with me or any of my old crew. But I still get lonely.