Chopper Unchopped (221 page)

THEY nailed Christ to the cross for telling lies – or was it for telling the truth? Millions upon millions have died during the past 2000 years in more wars than can be counted, fighting over this very argument, and still we argue over the fact or fiction of it all. On that note, the author of this short yarn informs you that this is a work of total fiction, but always remembering that many a true word is spoken in jest.

The reader could be forgiven for suspecting that the tapestry of all fiction is held in place by threads of fact, and the sceptics among us believe that so-called fact is nothing but a patchwork quilt of fiction.

The arch enemy of all storytellers of the modern era is the lawyer – a strange being who, for the sheer sake of argument and the relentless search for profit, will look every truth in the face and see a lie, and will also seize upon each lie and attempt to strangle a truth from it.

Thus every teller of tales must, for legal reasons, clearly state that his is a work of total fiction. This one included. Sort of.

Before Elvis there was nothing.
– John Lennon

This book is dedicated to:

Alphonse Gangitano
Mad Charlie Heygeljai
Vincenzo Mannella
Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Arena
Marco Medici
Mark Antony Moore
Joe Quadara
Dominic Marafioti
Tony Peluso
Alfonso Muratore
Francesco De Masi
Vinenzo Angilletta
Liboria Benvenuto
Francesco Benvenuto

And the men who have vanished
and to the men who will
– and, believe me, they will.

–
Mark Brandon Read

THE murder of Melbourne underworld identity Alphonse Gangitano in the laundry of his home in Templestowe on 16 January, 1998, prompted me to write this. However, I stress that this is a yarn.

Mick and Al were big men – six foot and built like heavyweight boxers. Mick had once been a Victorian champion, but on his way to the Australian title realised that a heavy right cross couldn’t overcome a glass jaw, so he gave the game away gracefully. However, he maintained his easy-going, gentle-natured, kindly manner, unlike his best friend Al, who had the attitude of a junkyard dog who’d been sniffing petrol.

The two shared a single dream – to pull the Italian crime families of Melbourne together and create what they both saw on American movies and television as ‘the Mafia’. Yes, the Mafia in Australia. The fact that there was already a Mafia in Melbourne, a true Sicilian Mafia, didn’t seem to enter the heads of these two Calabrian tough guys. Such are the childish dreams of young men – dreams of criminal glory, power and wealth. Such dreams are the product of pure fantasy. But men who are strong and determined enough can sometimes turn fantasy into reality.

Mick Conforte and Big Al Cologne were two such men. Like Walt Disney, they turned their dreams into reality and it made them both rich at the turnstile. Crime is no different than anything else. A man has a dream and will either achieve it or fail. The difference being that, with crime, to fail usually means to die trying. There are no golden parachutes, superannuation schemes or preferential share options for gunmen.

‘Such is life,’ as old Ned said.

THE time is early 1974. The place is Johnny’s Green Room in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton. Johnny’s is a gathering place for old-time Aussie crooks, knockabouts, street fighters, gunmen, prostitutes, molls, madmen and up-and-coming, would-be Mafia dreamboat kids who think they can live out their own
Godfather
movie in Melbourne, Australia.

Outwardly it is a coffee bar and pool hall, but after dark it is a gathering point for the gutter trash and heavy cash trash of Melbourne’s supper club criminal world. It was also the first time a 16-year-old schoolboy named Al Cologne, a posh dago from a well-to-do family who’d attended De La Salle, Marcellin and Taylors College, came into contact with a 19-year-old hood from the wrong side of town. Hacker Harris was the classic psychopath – happy, smiling, a natural comic and joke teller, yarn spinner and liar with family connections and friendships from Thomastown to Collingwood.

Harris was strong as a bull, but was considered a dumb ox of a kid … a loud mouth lair whose wild comic yarns ran between fact and fiction until the listener could no longer tell the difference. There was only one point on which Harris never told a lie. That was his almost magical ability to make firearms appear out of nowhere with a wave of his drinking hand. In 1974, the young 16-year-old Alfonse Cologne had never seen a real handgun. He was about to try to sell a replica .45 calibre to a madman who was carrying a sawn-off shotgun.

The whole thing was so childish and the brawl that followed so predictable. The only sad thing in the whole affair was that Al Cologne had paid $300 for the .45-calibre replica, on the firm understanding that it was real. He tried to sell it on to Harris, still thinking it was real.

What followed the wild brawl that erupted was even stranger than Cologne’s stupidity: Harris accepted Cologne’s story of being conned and then gave Cologne his first true-blue firearm free of charge. It was a double barrel sawn-off hammer action 1938 shotgun. A classic cut-down masterpiece with a pistol grip and a box of solid load shells. In one fell swoop young Al Cologne was no longer just a kid with a dream, but an armed kid with a dream. So the story begins …

H DIVISION of Pentridge Prison was then the toughest, bloodiest, hardiest division in the most blood-soaked prison in Australia.

Hacker Harris, Jimmy Lochrie, Danny Johnson and a handful of hand-picked psychopaths were in the middle of a prison gang war that began in 1975. Harris headed up a prison gang nicknamed ‘The Raincoat Men’ because when it rained they never got wet due to the fact that Harris had secured the backing of the Governor of Security.

The H Division screws had to be seen to be believed. They were mindless, violent thugs who relished blood, a far cry from screws of the modern era. The modern-day lot would not be physically tough enough to pour a cup of tea for the jaw breakers that worked in H Division Pentridge during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Jimmy Lochrie asked Hacker a question. ‘Have you ever looked into a mirror and seen your clear reflection, then reached out to touch it only to realise that there was no mirror there at all?’

Hacker Harris stared at his friend and thought for a moment, before answering. ‘No Jim, I haven’t.’

‘Well, I have,’ replied Jim.

Jimmy Lochrie was quite insane and a conversation with him often fluttered off into the shadow of the valley of rubber-room magic.

Hacker looked at Jim and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of cutting my left hand off, mate, and getting one of them stainless steel pirate’s hooks, like the old Captain Hook.’

Jim nodded, as if it was the most sensible thing he’d heard all day. Maybe it was. Then he topped Hacker’s little brainwave with one of his own. ‘Vincent Van Gogh had the right idea,’ he said slowly. ‘He couldn’t paint for shit, but because he cut his ear off he wrote himself into the pages of history.’

Hacker nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right there, mate,’ he said. ‘The world is full of one-handed men, but there ain’t no buggers I ever heard of in the Melbourne criminal world with no ears.’

‘Yeah’, said Jim, ‘food for thought. Food for thought.’

‘Anyway,’ replied Hacker, ‘enough of this shit … who’s got the tomahawk?’

‘I have,’ said Danny.

‘Well, give it here. We’ll give it a mocka in the shower yard after lunch’.

Jimmy smiled.

Danny looked worried.

Hacker Harris just looked blank. For him, the Raincoat War was a war he started, backed by a gang he’d created, against enemies he hand-picked. It was a war he knew he couldn’t lose.

Harris was a young man with a dream, too. An insane dream – to not only become the most feared criminal in Melbourne, but the most hated – and nothing or no-one would prevent Hacker Harris from reaching out and touching this dream.

The old saying, ‘Beware of what you wish for because it might come true’, had not yet filtered through to the mind of the young psychopath. So, too, does another story begin.

MICKY D’Andrea, Joe Gatto, Bobby MacNamara and Johnny Moore sat in silence as D’Andrea’s wife took the phone call from Geoff ‘Mumbles’ Kindergarten. Micky D’Andrea never spoke on telephones and, as a result, his wife Vicki spent a lot of her time taking phone messages …

‘Bowling ball?’, said Vicki, ‘I don’t understand.’ Then she went silent and began to cry.

‘Dead?’ she whimpered. ‘How? What? But who’d do that? And why?’

‘What’s going on? asked Micky.

‘It’s Alfonse,’ cried Vicki. ‘The cocksuckers killed him.’

Micky hung his head like a man who had received sad news.

He had already heard the news before, but didn’t say anything. Joe Gatto did the same. Johnny Moore and Bobby MacNamara, however, screamed in anger, outrage and shock. They couldn’t believe it. At once Moore rang the silent home phone number of his friend and hero, Alfonse Cologne. A policeman answered and explained that Mrs Cologne had been given medication by the family doctor and couldn’t come to the phone.

‘By the way, Johnny’ said the cop, ‘We want to talk to you.’

Johnny Moore hung up. The unbelievable had happened. The death of a legend is always more unbelievable than it is sad. The whole thing was totally mind-numbing. Someone must have switched off the security system. It had to be a friend who was the last to see him alive.

‘God,’ said Johnny, ‘if Al’s gone we’re all fucked.’

Joe Gatto looked into the eyes of Micky D’Andrea and spoke softly in Italian. D’Andrea nodded.

‘What’s going on?’ yelled Moore.

D’Andrea looked at Moore and replied, ‘Some of us are fucked Johnny, some of us aren’t. Let’s just wait and see.’

‘Wait and see be fucked!’ yelled Moore, ‘we gotta hit back!’

‘Hit who?’ asked Gatto softly. ‘Hit the wind, hit the rain? We can only hit an enemy we can see. Come on.’

‘So who do we hit?’ Moore continued, frustrated and frightened. He began to cry.

‘Hacker Harris – we’ll kill him.’

‘But he’s in jail,’ said Gatto patiently, as if he was talking to a retarded child.

Young Johnny Moore had once bashed the wife of ‘Mumbles’’ best mate, Brian Carl Hanlon, and Alfonse had protected Moore from Hanlon’s revenge. Suddenly, a wave of past sins and old scores were flooding into the paranoid, speed-ravaged mind of young Johnny Moore.

Workman, what about his crew? And Harris, that old no-eared mental case. The Albanians … shit, the whole world was caving in on Young Johnny. He went to the bathroom and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A good blast of speed would clear his head. That’s what he needed.

‘Why? Why?’ he muttered as he slid the needle into his arm and pushed the plunger.

Who? Why? None of it made any sense. Suddenly, Johnny felt very frightened and paranoid.

‘Alphonso,’ he cried as he looked into the bathroom mirror, tears in his eyes. ‘I love you mate – goodbye.’

A NEWSPAPER reporter named Ray Jackson was visiting Hacker Harris in prison. Old Hacker was due for release on 12 February, 1998, and Ray thought he could get a scoop.

Hacker had become a legend simply by living up to his motto ‘the man who wins the game is the man who lives the longest’. Having survived 23 years in various prisons in two different states and several gang wars, both in and out of prison, Hacker had achieved his boyhood dream. He had become the most feared and by far the most hated man in the Melbourne criminal world.

Hacker had never lost his scallywag sense of comic fun and still spun wild yarns that ran from fact to fiction. As he had always said: ‘Bullshit baffles brains. Tell a thousand men a different story each and no one will ever know what you’re really up to.’

Ray had also done some stories on another Melbourne underworld criminal legend, Alfonse Cologne, and thought it would be good to get the two enemies of more than 20 years together for a photo session and television interview. When this was put to him, the old no-eared madman just smiled and replied, ‘Al will not live that long. Now remember this, because when it happens, and it will happen, I want you to remember that I told you first: Alphonso will be dead before I get out of jail. Believe me. I will live longer than him. The grave that dago suck is going into has already been dug.’

Ray Jackson could not believe this. After all, Hacker was a famous leg puller, joke teller and yarn spinner. Then again, old Hacker had two natural gifts: getting hold of guns and predicting the death of others.

Ray Jackson left wondering if he had just been handed the criminal inside tip of the year or whether he was the victim of the psychopath’s black sense of humour. With Hacker, one could never be quite sure, as many a true word was said in jest and Harris was a great player of psychological mind games. The two men parted company with one man smiling at a ‘joke’ he knew would come true and the other deeply puzzled.

ALFONSE Cologne was standing in the laundry of his $500,000 fortress of a home in Templestowe. Geoff ‘Mumbles’ Kindergarten had just left – he said he had to pop out for a packet of smokes.

‘Back in ten minutes,’ said Geoff. But ten minutes turned into something approaching 40 or 45 minutes. For some reason the security alarm system had been turned off.

Three men walked into the back of the house. Big Al looked up to see his old friend and partner, Big Mick Conforte, with another long-time friend, Mad Charlie Hajalic, in the company of a third man, a short thickset man he had known for years. But a man he didn’t want in his home for all that.

Alfonse was not yet in fear – he was just surprised at this unexpected and uninvited visit. ‘Hey,’ he said, frowning.

The short, thickset man replied, ‘Jesus wants ya for a sunbeam, pretty boy,’ and with that pulled out his snub nose .38 and sent a volley of shots into the big man’s body.

Alfonse staggered and fell with a look of surprise. Just then a fourth man entered the laundry yelling ‘Fuck it all – not the bloody body, the fucking head!’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said the newcomer, a blue-eyed man, ‘If you want a job done, do it yourself,’ and grabbed the gun from the short, thick-set Albanian. He pumped three shots into Big Al’s head. The four men then turned and ran. They jumped into a 1987 Ford LTD driven by a fifth man.

‘Hey, let me out round the corner,’ yelled Conforte. ‘No one said anything about killing anyone. We was supposed to talk. All we was supposed to do was talk.’

Charlie turned to Conforte. ‘Shut up, ya weak prick. You knew what the go was. It’s too late to start crying now.’

THE LTD pulled up and Conforte clambered out and disappeared. ‘Let me off further up the road,’ said Charlie. ‘Big Mick is waiting for me.’

‘Which Mick?’ asked Rod Attard, the driver of the LTD. ‘Not the brain-dead body builder. Jesus, don’t tell him nothing.’

‘Nah,’ said Charlie. ‘It will all fall back on ‘Mumbles’. I can’t believe he went for all this. The old apple cucumber. Fuck, when will they learn?’

As Charlie left the car, the Albanian spoke to him in Yugoslav. ‘If you love your mother, you’ll take this secret to your grave.’

Charlie nodded. He didn’t need to be told twice.