Chopper Unchopped (237 page)

The funny thing is there are two winners out of the war. One wasn’t involved and the other was a reluctant player.

Gatto had long worked out that his future was in mediation and cranes, not murder and standover crap. He did his best work in a suit over lunch, not down back lanes. But he was dragged into it and did what he had to do to make sure he never again had to look over his shoulder.

Williams has lost. He killed more but now he will spend most of the rest of his life in jail. As the caravan moves on, he will be remembered in old newspaper files and books like this. He will get old and younger prisoners who want to make a name for themselves will bash him. If he survives, he will end up in protection or working in the prison library. If he gets out, he will be an old frightened man who will have a panic attack just crossing the road. All his friends and hangers-on will have gone.

I will say one thing for Carl. He cut a deal and pleaded guilty. But he didn’t turn dog. He could have got a big discount if he had become a police witness, but no-one is doing jail time because of him. Even when the Morans shot him in 1999, he kept his mouth shut and decided to do his own dirty work.

Unlike Mokbel, you have to say, he has had the dash to pull the trigger at least once. The only time Tony lifted his hand was to sign a cheque.

So Mick was the winner. He came out of jail thirty kilos and a few friends lighter, but he is still in business.

And there is another winner. One who sat back and did nothing.

As I have said before, I intended to picnic on the side of the river and watch the bodies of my enemies float by. ‘Look, there goes another one … pass me a delicious chicken wing.’

Alphonse said he’d get me and he’s dead and then the Morans said they’d get me and they are all gone.

So, thanks Carl. You did me a big favour.

I’d visit you in jail, but I don’t care for prisons much these days. They are far too depressing.

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, ammo and tactics were all provided 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 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 most murders are easy to solve if 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 fifteen years. That’s how it works.

Even most murders involving crooks are the same. Cross words, then a body. Or 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, hard as a rock, because it was the brickies’ lime used to make mortar to lay bricks, not quicklime that eats away bodies.

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 even stupider because they ended up 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 fairytale. 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 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. Genuine 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.

That was the trouble with Carl Williams and Melbourne’s underworld war. He should have learnt from the old Painters and Dockers. Carl was into big statements. He wanted the bodies out there so that everyone knew he did it. He just believed that none of his crew would turn on him.

That is why he is a fat wombat that will come out of jail a very old wombat. Or not at all.

Forget the headlines – leave them to the newspapers. He should have moved in quietly, slipped his enemies one by one into the boot and taken them on a one-way ride into the bush. No bodies – no witnesses. Just a few lime funerals and then back to work. But he wanted the grand statement. It backfired big time.

As I said in
Chopper From The Inside
and quoted already a few pages back: ‘Australia is a big country and shovels are cheap.

Victoria may be the garden state but if you dug it up, you would find a heap of bodies. The garden probably grows so well because of all the blood and bone that has been spread over it.

If a crook goes missing in Melbourne, chances are he isn’t on holiday at Surfers Paradise. Anybody who adds up the numbers over the last 100 years will see I am right. Victoria is the state of the big vanish.’

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, Jason and Lewis Moran 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 twenty 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, but 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 up to twenty 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 anything up to 100.

To win a war you can’t have a time limit and you have to kill everybody and, naturally, over a twenty-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 fifteen names 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 twenty men crossed off the original list of sixty with maybe four to six more helpers having to go with them.

Then we will have a list of forty names. 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 forty more to go, it’s not such a fantastic tale to believe, after all …

The media will gobble it up as an underworld war. They will never know it is an extermination program. With any luck some of those on the list will blame others on the list for some of the deaths and start to kill each other.

It has happened at least twice in the last few years. Saves organisers the effort if they do it to themselves.

When it’s all over, the same three original thinkers will meet at the same pub in Collingwood and raise glasses of Irish whiskey and just nod. There will be nothing that will need to be said. That is if they haven’t turned the old pub into a poker machine dump or a coffee shop for trendies.

If they can put a man on the moon, you can kill him when he comes back to earth, then you can say, ‘Shit, I just shot the man on the moon.’ You might get put in a mental hospital but no-one will ever believe you enough to send you to jail. That is the beauty of a death list so large. Who is ever going to believe it?

So there it is, the blueprint for a twenty-year gang war hidden by a sea of bullshit, put together by the greatest criminal psychologist in the game, funded by cocaine dollars and heroin money handed over willingly by the new style of young Turks (Or should that be Lebanese Tony?) waiting to take over a criminal world and drug empire still ruled by men from the 1970s. Oh, I’ve forgotten the meth-amphetamine money.

The young drug dealers knew that if the dinosaurs of the criminal world fought, then the ants may rule. But they didn’t for a moment know the size of the plans.

The three original thinkers didn’t take a penny of this cash. Every cent was spent on outside help, arms, ammo, travel, accommodation, logistic support, intelligence and counter-intelligence. Spies and networks of spies, all working for controllers on a need to know basis within the various enemy camps.

It is the greatest military criminal operation ever launched in Australian criminal history.

Why, you ask? To which the answer is: For the best reason of all … Why not?

YOU can turn a lie into the truth within a month. Police investigations are launched on the basis of one body and one lie. They then proceed to go no place. Into the valley of the blind and in any war it is always good to pop off a few non-event bastards who have nothing to do with anything other than the fact that they knew a few of the real targets.

It is a totally one-sided war, but it must appear to look like a gang war. In a gang war, both sides know who they are up against but, in this war, only one side is getting hit by an enemy they cannot see and do not know.