Chopper Unchopped (34 page)

I told him once that when the day came that he did get blown away he would be found with his hand stuck in a bloody handbag, which was no way for a hard crim to go out. My attitude was that if you don’t carry your gun on you, you might as well not have a gun at all.

Anyway, my few words in jest proved true. When Brian did get blown away, with his last dying breath he was trying to get his bloody gun out of a handbag next to him. With his luck he probably would have grabbed the lipstick, and not even his color, at that.

I cannot name the man who killed Brian Kane. However, it is no great secret in criminal circles who pulled the trigger. And he, too, felt that the old gun in the handbag trick was the height of good humor. For a rat-cunning, shifty, streetwise old hood Brian Kane certainly died dumb.

ANOTHER person from that era was old Normie Lee, Dim Sim Normie, Chinese Normie, call him what you like. He was one of the quiet men of the Melbourne criminal world. He was involved with Ray Chuck’s crew, mostly in the thinking department.

Normie didn’t run around mouthing off or trying to shoot people in pubs. He was a loyal and trusted behind-the-scenes helper. It was always believed that Normie used money from the Great Bookie Robbery for Chuckles and the crew. There have been a number of rumors that several people went on the missing list via Normie’s Dim Sim machines and came out in tasty tid bits for public consumption, Les Kane among them. However, that was only rumor, although I have tended to steer clear of dimmies since then. Call me delicate, if you like.

I found Normie to be gentle, polite and good-natured, but very secretive and a touch paranoid. For Normie to die such a violent death was out of character. I know many men who I think could end up dying in a gun battle and Normie just wasn’t one of them. He was just another member of Ray’s crew who lost his way after the death of the General.

THE king of the headhunters in this country was the man known far and wide in the underworld as ‘Jimmy The Pom.’ I won’t use his real name because it would not be etiquette. Despite the mayhem and bloodshed behind him, Jimmy has never copped many serious convictions and he’s retired now, so he might be a little offended if his real name was connected with the kidnapping, torture and murder his crew carried out here and in England over the years.

‘The Pom’ was the master of violence. He was a former mercenary, former member of the Kray brothers firm in London’s East End and the IRA. His reputation for violence was not only Australia-wide but international.

‘The Pom’ was not strictly an accurate nickname for Jimmy, because his sympathies were with the Irish. He reputedly acted as personal bodyguard to the IRA deputy Joe Cahill in the early 1960s. Later, the story goes, he served under the famous mercenary ‘Mad Mike Hoare’ with his fifth commando unit in the Congo in 1964. He came to Australia in the late 1960s, and with a small crew of ex-IRA men and Sydney and Melbourne criminals, he started what became known and feared as the ‘Toecutter Gang.’

This might be hard to understand, but to me ‘The Pom’ was a wonderful fellow. I’m nothing if not egotistical, and he flattered me – paying me the highest of compliments when I was only 24.

‘Chopper’, he said, ‘I could butcher the Australian criminal world if I had a dozen like you.’

‘The Pom’ backed Billy Longley in the bloody painters and dockers war in the 1970s. He was arrested in NSW for the murder of Jake Maloney in 1972, was later acquitted on appeal, came to Victoria on weapons charges and then was deported. The last I heard of him he was involved in business with Charlie Kray, the older brother of Reggie and Ronnie Kray. The word is that he is now retired in comfort, spending his summers in Spain with the rest of London’s retired gangsters.

Jimmy was a friend and a teacher to me. I will never forget some of his sayings. One was: ‘There is no mafia in Belfast’ … meaning that when it comes down to tin tacks, blood will beat money every time. Another saying of his was: ‘Don’t toss the party until the body’s been buried.’

THERE are many stories about people like ‘The Pom.’ But the most fearsome is about the ‘tattoo torture’ job in NSW in the very early 1970s.

It happened when the toecutter gang kidnapped a payroll bandit and put him under heavy questioning as to where he had hidden $75,000. After removing every toe on his left foot and getting nowhere, they knew they had a tough bastard on their hands.

They laid the bandit on his front and held him firmly while they cut around the edges of the poor fellow’s back — right around a big tattoo of an eagle fighting a dragon. Then they took a pair of pliers and slowly peeled the skin and tattoo off the fellow’s back. They told me later it was like ripping leather. It took a fair amount of strength and care to remove the full back job tattoo. The blood-curdling screams stopped half way through the operation. It was thought by all concerned that the fellow had simply passed out. However, when they tried to revive him, it was found that the poor bugger had died.

They thought about this. They figured no man would suffer the tortures of hell simply to protect money. No man could endure the insane pain of being skun alive after having his toes cut off just to safeguard the whereabouts of a few rolls of paper. Then they realised that although the bandit wouldn’t lay down his life for money alone, he might do it for love. The guy had died for love, not money.

The answer was that the money must be in the possession of the payroll bandit’s wife, and he had died to protect her. The toecutters wrapped the tattoo skin in plastic and a member of his gang visited the wife, a beautiful woman who had been a loyal and loving wife to the bandit for 20 years since they had been teenage sweethearts.

She asked: ‘Is he alive?’

The answer was ‘Yes … give us the money and you can have him.’

She paid the money over. Then they told her that the operation was a success … but the patient had died.

Postscript: the woman in question never went to the police. I was told by a gang member a long time later that she was the strongest lady he’d ever met in his life. And the look on her face is still a memory that haunts him to this day.

I would describe it as one of his few regrets. Maybe his only one.

A TOECUTTER very close indeed to ‘Jimmy The Pom’ and a well-known dockie just as close to Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley were rumored to be responsible for the death of Alfred ‘The Ferret’ Nelson, a painter and docker who went on the missing list in the early 1970s during the dockies’ wars.

Nelson’s car was pulled out of the water near South Wharf. It is believed by some who should know that ‘The Ferret’ died a painful death, indeed, and that the toecutter mentioned above was in charge of proceedings. The story goes that before they filled in the grave the painter and docker urinated on Nelson’s mortal remains.

The toecutter was a blood and guts boy from way back, but he could not abide what he called ‘bad manners.’ He pulled out a .45 automatic and told the dockie: ‘If you don’t put your dick away in two seconds I’ll blow the bloody thing off.’

The dockie, one of the toughest men on the Australian waterfront, obeyed with such haste that he wet his pants. Or so the story goes.

Of course, I could never admit that a man close to ‘The Pom’ told me this story first hand or in the first person, and I’ll have to put it down as just another old criminal yarn.

‘The Pom’ played by hard rules, yet he also had a strange sense of fair play and correct conduct. When he was with Mad Mike Hoare in the fifth commando unit in the Congo in the mid-1960s he was asked to question a suspected informer. There is a scurrilous allegation that he removed the man’s eyes with a teaspoon before questioning – yet refused to allow torture below the belt, as he could not abide crude conduct. Strange man.

There is a story that Jimmy walked into a Sydney hotel and an acquaintance remarked to him that it was a ‘nice day.’ Without a word Jimmy pulled out his gun and smashed the fellow across the face and said: ‘When I want a weather report I’ll ask for one.’ What a comic.

THINKING about ‘The Pom’ and his adventures brings back the name of a well-known underworld figure, Johnny Regan, the so-called ‘vice king of Sydney.’ Regan was a hoon – a common or garden pimp – a criminal pastime that in NSW is seen as a good job if you can get it. In Melbourne, a hoon or pimp is one step up the social ladder from a rockspider. Men involved in living off the earnings of women are regarded by right-thinking people as scum, bludgers, pimps and arsewipes.

I will never forget the time when Regan was down for the Melbourne Cup once I showed him just what I thought of his reputation as a violent and highly dangerous man. We both ended up at the same party and his big talk and loud mouth drowned out all the others until I headbutted the fool to the ground.

I put the rat down three times before the old gunman Horatio Morris said to him: ‘You’d better stay down, son, or he’ll kill you.’ And that was the last we heard of Johnny Regan until he got himself killed the following year. He was a joke, typical Sydney ‘piss and wind.’ He had plenty of razzle dazzle and ‘We play rugby, aren’t we tough’ talk. I’ve never met a pimp who could fight, and Johnny Regan was a classic example. No doubt if I’d been a woman in a brothel he would have beaten me near to death.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with ‘Jimmy The Pom’, stay tuned. To cut a long story short, rumor has it that he was the last person to see Regan alive. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly vouch for the accuracy of this allegation, and I would put it down to foul slander and gossip. But in the interest of telling a good story I will recount this and other rumors just as I heard them from someone very close and dear to Jimmy himself.

‘The Pom’ was arrested for the murder of another toecutter called Jake Maloney, who had himself earlier killed Kevin Gore. ‘The Pom’ was rightly acquitted of the charge, but the rumor persisted that Maloney died because he wrongly advised that a body tossed into Sydney Harbor would be eaten by sharks. ‘The Pom’ knew nothing of sharks.

As it happened, a chap by the name of Baldy Blair was thrown in the harbor (he was dead at the time) and the rumor is that a certain toecutter was horrified to read in the newspapers that Baldy’s body was not eaten by sharks at all, but washed up on the beach in Botany Bay.

The rumor is that the last words Maloney heard were: ‘Sharks, hey, Jake. I’ll give you bloody sharks, you idiot.’ And then a gun went ‘bang, bang’ and that was the end of Jake. Of course, I do not believe for a moment that this reflects on the character of ‘Jimmy The Pom’, as it is nothing but gossip.

Mind you, if I had been an innocent bystander, and a policeman had asked me if I could describe the person who spoke those last words to Jake Maloney, I would point just below my chin and say: ‘Only up to here.’

That’s the sort of effect the old toecutter has on people’s memories.

IN the summer of 1974, Victorians were shaken out of their holiday mood by the news that a married Salvation Army couple had been senselessly murdered on a lonely road near Berwick.

The couple, Colonel Ronald Walter Smith, 65, and Minna Radcliffe Smith, 67, were on their way to take a gift of plums to relatives on January 17, when they were killed.

Colonel Smith had been shot in the head and chest, and his wife in the head, chest and shoulder.

Police believed the killer ordered the couple from their small 1968 white Mazda sedan, then executed them. He then tried to steal the car, but bogged it in soft ground caused by heavy summer rains. He was forced to abandon the car and flee. The dead man’s body was found under the right rear wheel of the car, the woman’s about two metres away. Police believe she was shot as she tried to run away after her husband was killed. Robert James Barron, then 25, was charged with the murders.

It was alleged Barron flagged the car down in Darling Road, East Malvern, after a drinking session with a mate in a local hotel and ordered the couple to drive to a St Kilda flat, and later to Berwick.

A key Crown witness, Kevin Marsden, told the court that Barron later told him: ‘I knocked them both. I must have been mad. I run them both over.’

Another witness told of finding the bodies. ‘I saw the body of a male near the rear wheel of the car. His body had tyre marks on the body.’

After a six-day trial during which the defence did not offer evidence and Barron did not make a statement, he was found guilty.

At one stage he sacked his lawyer; he also yelled abuse at a witness. At the inquest he had to be removed from the court.

Before sentence Mr Justice Gillard said that he usually did not comment about a jury decision and only handed down the penalty.

‘However, having regard to the evidence of this case, I must say I agree with the verdict of the jury. These were atrocious crimes with no redeeming feature, and it is very difficult to understand why anybody should have been guilty of such callousness and shocking conduct.’

It took the jury of seven women and five men just 75 minutes to reach the unanimous verdict of guilty.

As soon as the foreman declared the verdict, Barron cried out, ‘you have just found an innocent man guilty. You’re all murderers. How does it feel to be a murderer.’

One woman in tears at the back of the court yelled out; ‘you bastards, what’s he going to be like as an old man?’

Asked if he had anything to say before sentencing Barron said: ‘There’s no justice.’ He then turned to a group of detectives who had given evidence against him and said: ‘What about you, you bastards. You got Ryan hanged on hearsay, and now me.’

Barron was one of the last men in Victoria sentenced to death. The penalty was later commuted to life in prison. In 1976 he was sentenced to four months after he escaped from Pentridge Prison. He scaled the south wall of the jail but was recaptured within minutes.

The then head of the homicide squad, Mr Bill Walters, said he remembered Barron well. ‘He was a violent criminal of his time who showed no remorse for what he had done. He was a person without compassion, or any redeeming features whatsoever.’

In 1992 he was still in custody and was considered insane.

THERE was a young chappie out at Pentridge Prison many years ago who was popular with most other crims, yet feared by them at the same time. As I was to find so often, I held a somewhat different view of the gentleman.

His name is Bobby Barron. He was the bloke who murdered two Salvation Army officers in the early 1970s when he wanted to steal their car — a bit much for a car, even for a bloke with my sensitive ways.

The Salvo husband and wife team gave him a lift when he was hitch-hiking and he repaid them by killing them in cold blood. Then he put their bodies under the back wheels of the car to try and get out of the bog.

Now I’ve always liked Salvos. I’d always buy a
Watchtower
when a Salvo came through the pub. Ask anyone, I’ve always been a bit of a softie. There was a wonderful fellow, a Salvo, who used to visit H Division to ask prisoners if they needed Christmas gifts to send to their children. This was the sort of Christian thing the Salvos would do, that the other religious types failed to bother with.

The Salvos would do things without any fuss or fanfare. I would watch with an eagle eye as a stream of so-called top gangsters and armed robbery men, some who would talk about the money they made in six figure numbers, would tell their sob stories to the Salvo to get presents for their kids. It was pathetic to watch and see the big-talking gangsters take advantage of Christian charity. It was something I always remembered. They would rather spend their own money in jail on drugs and get the Salvos to provide the presents for the kids.

Barron was once a top streetfighter and an up and coming gunman, well connected with certain members of the underworld. But it is my expert opinion that the use of the drug LSD in the early 1970s sent him into a world of insanity from which he never returned.

I was with Bobby in B Division in 1975. He was then considered to be the fittest man in Pentridge. He was also as mad as a cut snake and had wild and crazy eyes. He refused to speak to anyone, which was fairly handy, because when he did he just didn’t make sense. Other inmates were always a little on edge when he was around. He gave people the creeps. He was a spooky bastard.

Bobby and I met up again in H Division in 1976, after he escaped and was on the outside for all of about 20 seconds. Let me tell you, freedom did not help his equilibrium in the brain box department, if you get my meaning.

He walked around the Number Two Industry Yard of H Division with a razor blade in his pocket, and he was no apprentice barber, let me tell you. He would spend his days staring at me and Jimmy Loughnan. I was always taught that staring at someone was the height of bad manners, particularly if you carried a razor blade and carried on like an extra from
The Exorcist.

So it was that Bobby Barron was carried out out of the Number Two industry yard with his skull shattered in a dozen places with chips of skull bone, hair, skin and flesh splattered around the place.

Not a pretty sight. Particularly before dinner. From memory, it was steak-and-kidney pudding that night.

We all thought he would die, but he didn’t. For some stupid reason the police interviewed Jimmy Loughnan and myself over poor Bobby’s mishap. I told the police that I thought they were jumping to conclusions and had ignored the obvious — the attempted suicide angle of the case.

He may have been mad but Bobby Barron was a solid hard crim and he didn’t give anyone up, and whoever did it was never brought to justice. No-one in the Industry Yard saw anything … Danny James was taking a piss, Johnny Price was washing his hands, Jimmy Loughnan was watching a bullant crawling up the wall and I was watching Jimmy Loughnan while he was watching the bullant. Sadly, none of us could help the police on this occasion, much as we would have liked.

For all the police knew, Bobby was attacked by the Phantom of the Opera. Allegations that Jimmy Loughnan pulled Bobby’s coat while I caved his head in with a vice handle are, to repeat an often-used expression, foul gossip and slander.

The last I heard Bobby Barron was residing in J Ward at the Ararat Mental Hospital for the criminally insane. He may never again see the light of day. Years after the incident I met him in Jika Jika. I gave him a TV and a radio. He was like a small child in the mind.

Bobby thought he remembered what had happened in H Division. He told me he had been attacked by some bad fairies. He was totally gone … maybe he should have run for Parliament.