Chopper Unchopped (5 page)

I CAN’T give Dave the Jew’s last name, but I can give you a short profile of him. He has been my close friend since I was 15 years old, and he is, to say the least, a very odd fellow. Very strange, indeed. But then, you’d expect a bloke with no ears to have strange friends, wouldn’t you?

Dave is an occasional criminal and part-time gunman — but without a criminal record. He has never had his prints taken and the police don’t even know he exists, but he has mixed with and done work for some big-time criminals, including a few of your so-called Mr Bigs. Not all the dangerous men get talked about in the newspapers or end up in court rooms or prison cells.

Dave is sometimes called ‘Meyer Blue Eyes’ because of his vivid blue eyes. He has an uncle in America called ‘Al Malnik’, a Jewish money man who was groomed by the late American Jewish financial underworld figure Meyer Lansky. I know it all sounds totally unbelieveable — but the FBI could tell you who ‘Al Malnik’ is.

Dave the Jew is also close to Abe Saffron’s family, Abe being some sort of a Dutch uncle of Dave’s. His father was a well-known Melbourne restaurant owner, and another relative is a clothing manufacturer in Melbourne. His mother died recently, he was born and bred in South Yarra, educated at Wesley College, is a non-smoker and non-drinker, and can’t drive a car — although he sometimes insists on doing so.

Dave has been a close personal friend of a top IRA man for years, and spent six months in Ireland in 1975 or 1976. The Jew is a great man for international politics. He has collected $15,000 for the Sinn Fein but he has donated half of it to the Orange Lodge here in Melbourne. Talk about having a foot in either camp. The Jew says he has mates in both camps, so it is only fair. Apart from that, he has always liked having a bit each way.

He spent about nine months in the Israeli Army in 1980-1981, then deserted. He can never return to Israel again — they would shoot him. He was locked up in a fort in the Philippines, but escaped and returned to Australia.

He has undergone treatment for a mental condition — paranoia — and sometimes believes he is the living, breathing spirit or reincarnation of the late American-Jewish gangster Benny ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.

Dave is a lot of things. He is as mad as a hatter, as shifty as a shithouse rat, as smart as a whip and as dangerous as a black snake on a dark night. And a true and loyal friend, which is why I cannot betray his name.

Several unsolved murders can be put down to Dave the Jew.

One of the strangest things about Dave, as the son of strict Jewish parents, was his constant reading of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mien Kampf’. I asked him one day why he read such a book and he looked at me and replied quietly: ‘Know thy enemy’.

I have always remembered that, and I have used that tactic ever since. For example, how do you locate an enemy if you don’t know where he is living or if he is in hiding? Locate his Mum and Dad’s address. The one day of the year when you can bet that your enemy or target will be at a certain address is Christmas Day at his Mum’s place. Most people go to Mum’s on Christmas Day … unless your name is Chopper Read, in which case you go and have a counter lunch. Even Christmas Day would not induce me to eat steamed chicken.

Another fact is that most men can be located either at a funeral or in a hospital waiting room — the trick being to get them to those two spots. And all ethnic people love their mothers. Once you have explained a matter to ‘mummy’ she will speak to her son for you. Bingo.

Know thy enemy. Basic Black and Tan logic and tactics. The Black and Tans being the feared paramilitary unit used by the British Army against the IRA in the early part of this century. I won’t go into Black and Tan methods of carrying out interrogations. Suffice to say that I said to (Lynas Patrick) Driscoll once that I considered the removal of toes to be rather humane by comparison.

Speaking of which, Dave the Jew rang me one day in 1977 and asked could I come to an address in Port Melbourne. I took a taxi from Rockley Road, South Yarra, armed to the teeth and carrying a small bag containing a hand-held gas bottle and blow torch.

The game was afoot, if you get my meaning. Dave the Jew was the best headhunter and catcher I’d ever known. He’d been drinking with a crew of Irish seamen on the advice of Vincent Villeroy, the old Irish boxer, soldier and standover man we knew. One of these seamen — we’ll call him Sweeney — was working on a bodgie ticket and papers. He was bringing smack into Melbourne. Neither Dave nor I had the slightest interest in smack, but on Vincent’s advice we watched and waited, ready to pounce, until cash changed hands.

Dave had lain under a house in Port Melbourne with a sleeping bag, pillow, and cans of lemonade and baked beans from Friday until Saturday night. It was about 2am on the Sunday morning when, at last, Sweeney staggered up the driveway to visit his old mother, drunk as a lord.

‘Bloody mothers’, said Dave. ‘They will be the death of us all’. Ha ha. Dave often made mother jokes. Poor old Sweeney didn’t even get to wake Mum up. Dave had got him.

An iron bar over a drunk’s head is pretty useless, but across the back of the back of the neck not too hard, it puts a drunk to sleep. You have to know what you’re doing, or you can shatter the central nervous system. But the Jew was an old hand at this technique. In no time Sweeney was asleep in the boot of the car.

We drove a short distance to a hotel where Vincent Villeroy said we could use the cellar without making any noise.

There I was, Dr Chopper with his medical bag, doing a night call at this pub in Port Melbourne. Vincent let me in, and stayed in the back bar drinking with the publican, pretending to have no idea whatsoever that ‘torture most foul’ was to take place in the keg cellar.

I went down and shut the trap behind me. There was Dave the Jew trying to revive a sleeping Sweeney, to no avail. ‘Take his shoes and socks off’, said I. ‘This will liven him up’. I pulled the gas bottle out, turned it on and lit her up, adjusting the flame to a good yellow, not a fine blue. I wanted to produce pain, not cut his feet off. I put the flame to the sole of the bare foot. Dave held it up for me. Within a matter of 20 seconds the sole was bubbling, snap-crackle-pop, a burning mess. Flesh burns because of the fat content.

The smell was shocking. The fumes had reached the nostrils of Vincent and the publican. The trap door went up. It was the bloody publican’s wife. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she screamed. We dropped the foot and ran up the stairs. It was havoc.

The publican was out cold. Vincent had knocked him out. The publican’s wife was screaming. Her three kiddies in their night clothes were standing in the stairway asking what the matter was. Twenty years jail flashed through my mind. Dave had his gun out and wanted to kill every living human being in the pub. This was toe-cutter comedy at its most insane. To top it off we could still smell the fumes of Sweeney’s bloody foot. It was alight, smoking and smelling terrible.

‘Aaah!’ screamed the publican’s wife. She grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran down the cellar stairs and put the foot out. Dave turned to old Vincent, yelling ‘You stupid punchy Irish bastard! I thought you said the bloody pub was empty!’

‘No problem’ said Vincent. ‘They won’t tell.’

‘Won’t tell’ yelled Dave. ‘I’m killing them anyway!’

This was a tricky one. We had seen Dave the Jew like this before, his blue eyes ablaze, gun in hand. Too much ‘Mien Kampf’, if you ask me.

It was obvious the general had to take control before Dave shot the household, including myself and Vincent.

‘Okay’, I said to Dave. ‘They are off’.

Dave relaxed. ‘Vinnie’, I said to Vincent, ‘give Dave a hand’. I winked as I said it, and as Dave looked away the old ex-heavyweight pug knocked the Jew out.

‘Right, cuff him and put him in the boot’, I said.

By this time the publican had woken up. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’re out of here. Give us a hand with the stiff in the cellar.’ Me and the publican carried Sweeney out to the car and laid him in the back seat. Vinnie was still trying to secure the boot so Dave couldn’t escape. Me, Vinnie and the publican went back in. The kids were put to bed quickly. We all had a stiff whisky. The pub still stunk of burnt flesh. I promised the publican and his wife two grand each for compo, and that Vinnie would deliver it. No problem, said the publican and his wife. Thank you for that.

Back in the car we had a kicking and screaming Dave in the boot. ‘Shut up!’ I yelled as we drove along, ‘or I’ll pump a few through the back seat.’ Dave shut up. I said to Vinnie: ‘When’s this bastard’s ship leave?’

He looked at his watch and said, ‘in about half an hour’.

I said: ‘Right, get him back on the ship. Give me the Jew’s gun and cuff keys and let me out now’. Vincent pulled up. I opened the boot and pulled Dave out. He was angry but in control. I undid his cuffs, tossed the cuffs and keys in the boot and said to Vincent: ‘This is your fuck-up. You fix it’.

He said: ‘I’m sorry, Chopper. I’m sorry.’ I said: ‘Piss off, now. Go’.

Dave and I walked in the cold night air, calming down. ‘We would be better off with a cut lunch and a nine to five’, said Dave.

We both laughed. We had been through a lot, the mad Jew and I, and we loved each other like brothers. We saw a taxi and hailed it, and went back to Dave’s home in South Yarra. We woke his Mum and had a nice sit-down dinner.

Dave’s Mum said: ‘You both smell like burnt hair’. His Dad came down — and knew the smell after one sniff.

‘I haven’t smelt that smell since 1943’ he said.

‘It’s not what you think, father’ Dave said.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Dave’s Dad. ‘You smell like a Belsen barbecue. I’m going back to bed.’

As it turned out, Vincent did fix it. Sweeney slept unconscious through the whole thing and is now living in Spain.

I can tell a lot of stories about Dave.

Once he was contracted to do a hit on a major underworld figure — a Sydney identity visiting Melbourne for the November racing calendar. Dave the Jew was armed with a Colt Armalite AR-15 Sporter, which loads with a 5.56mm NATO round. The gun was fitted with a ’scope, and he had a 30-round clip.

The ‘victim’ was staying with friends in a house in the eastern suburbs. There had been some planning and expense put in beforehand. A flat had been rented across the road under a bodgie name eight weeks before the Sydneysider’s November visit. It was a balcony flat on the second floor. The front window of the flat was no use because there were trees in the way, so the shot had to be from the side balcony. On the day, Dave took up his position and watched as the target and his wife and son walked towards a Ford LTD which was waiting for them.

Dave suddenly decided to climb over the balcony rail and sit with one leg each side of the rail to get a better aim. It was a fairly easy 180-yards shot. He leaned out to the side a bit, taking perfect aim for the classic heart shot. But just as he was about to squeeze the trigger he slipped and fell off his perch.

It was two storeys from the balcony to the rock and cactus garden below, and Dave’s screams of pain brought the ‘victim’ and his son running across the street to see what was wrong. They found Dave the Jew in great pain with a broken arm, and bruised and bleeding. By chance the rifle had landed on the other side of the fence out of sight. The Sydney man and his wife and son and a friend drove the Jew to hospital. Later Dave sent a thankyou card to the Sydney chap.

It is an embarrassing true story, going to prove that the best of us can go arse over elbow. I thought being driven to hospital by the unsuspecting ‘murder victim’ was a touch of Hitchcock. They simply thought the poor fellow had fallen from the balcony.

There’s a postscript to that story. The chap who did all the beforehand planning and paid Dave $20,000 cash up front to do the hit was later shot dead himself … not long after he demanded his money back and threatened the Jew’s life. Ha ha.

In early 1987, in Collingwood, I had four shots fired at me from a moving car. I made phone calls to various people and tried to have the offenders identified and located. I received information that it might be an Italian crew from Carlton. I rang Dave the Jew and demanded he case all the clubs in Carlton.

The Jew obtained a Salvation Army uniform and hat and collection tin — and a dozen copies of the ‘War Cry’ — and he did Lygon Street. He noted that they are a ‘bloody good-hearted lot’ in Lygon Street: he made some $200-odd dollars, most of it from the clubs. However, an observant eye would have picked one flaw in the Jew’s cunning covert operation. The Salvos don’t collect money at two o’clock in the morning.

He reported back on key figures, car rego numbers, club telephone numbers, where different people parked their cars, approximate nightly cash turnover — and the number of fire extinguishers, a key factor. He reported access to rear exits and the width of entrance stairs.

I was considering a little IRA tactic called ‘petrol and plenty of it’. However, I was approached by certain police who swore to me that this crew was not guilty. I was of two minds about believing this or not. Dave, however, felt a fire was a wonderful idea, and that guilt could be determined after the event. The fact that the police knew about the shots fired at me, and police interest in my feelings re: Lygon Street, and the fact guilt had never been proven, led me to cancel ‘Operation Wog Fry’.

It was a case where a peace meeting between my good self and the police stopped a war. We were going to turn part of Lygon Street into an inferno. I think Dave was a little disappointed we didn’t go ahead with the barbecue.

Dion was an Irishman — a seaman who went to Melbourne at least once a year. I met him through Dave the Jew. Dion now lives in South Africa and won’t be returning, so it’s okay to tell this story.

In 1977 an argument broke out between Dion and Dave the Jew. Dave rang me and wanted me to come to his home in South Yarra. When I got there I found a badly-wounded Dion. Dave had shot him three times in the back, once in the chest, once in the buttocks, and once in the upper left leg. Dave had used a .32 calibre revolver.