Chopper Unchopped (79 page)

MY lawyer Anita Betts brought Michael Hodgman QC to see me one Saturday and we had a chat for about an hour or so. As I’ve said, he is the strangest Liberal politician I’ve ever met and I have met a few of the bastards in my time, around racecourses and other places where sporting gentlemen gather for fun and fancy. Hodgman is very much a fighter for the underdog, a Lt Commander in the Navy Reserve and rumored to have been a dashing lady’s man in his single days.

I ran a little jest past him – about a suave devil like him bringing new meaning to the naval term ‘permission to go below’ – and he roared laughing. He is the most knockabout Liberal politician I’ve ever come across, and rates with knockabouts of all sorts.

In my youth my old gunman mate Horatio Morris would take me to the John Curtin Hotel in Lygon Street, Carlton, a pub littered with union leaders, commies, Labor politicians and similar riffraff.

It was a common sight to see Norm Gallagher, then still very much the boss of the Builders’ Laborers, drinking with Bob Hawke, the boss of the ACTU. Not to mention John Halfpenny, Laurie Carmichael and assorted Trades Hall backroom heavyweights.

The place was like a second home for a lot of this mob. One night I, together with others, helped Bob Hawke after he had fallen over in the toilet and was very sick. Obviously, he had eaten something which didn’t agree with him.

Of course, seeing someone drunk in those days was not uncommon at the John Curtin. After the fifth drink every bugger seemed to turn commie and they started calling each other ‘comrade’. I remember once when a member of the Waterside Workers’ Federation held a member of the Trades Hall Council at gunpoint in the men’s toilet over non-payment of a debt and a prominent member of the BLF stepped in and repaid the debt himself, then turned to the bloke from the THC and said, ‘That’s your vote whenever I need it’. That’s politics, I guess, whether it’s the Victorian Left or the NSW Right.

As a 17-year-old kid in the company of one of the most feared old-time criminal fighters in Melbourne, my presence at the hotel was never questioned. Billy ‘the Texan’ Longley would make appearances. Pat Shannon, ‘Putty Nose’ Nicholls, Big Dougy Sproule, football players, TV and newspaper reporters, politicians’ wives and professional whores. It was an odd mixture indeed.

Bob Hawke was a strange bloke in those days. I know he got off the piss in later years, but Hawke and his drunken, loud raving voice could be heard all over the bar. How the bloke was never taken outside and kicked senseless is a puzzle. It’s a good thing he didn’t get down to the police club or a dockies’ pub and bung on an act, because he would have had his face rearranged nice and quick. He was never as popular as he thought he was. He was very powerful, but not loved by those who knew him, which is fair enough and the way it often is.

I’ve never been a real fan of Hawke’s since then. I have always taken my hat off to the work he did but not the man himself. What I want to know now is when we are going to hear the end of him? When he became Prime Minister in 1983, a popular rank and file Labor Party tune was ‘The working class can kiss his arse, Bob’s got the foreman’s job at last’. But every poor mug Labor true believer thought that he was Jack Lang, Doc Evatt and Gough Bloody Whitlam all come again. Didn’t Bill Hayden mark him well with his immortal ‘drover’s dog’ remark? The only true Labor prime ministers that Aussie land has had were John Joseph Curtin, 1941-45, and Edward Gough Whitlam, 1972-75.

As for Hawke, as far as I’m concerned and as far as a million other Aussie Labor-voting battlers are concerned, he will always be remembered as the bloke who invited the ALP to the dance, then bent the old moll over and screwed the arse off her. And who was holding Hawke’s coat while he did it … Jack Lang’s pet in his dago suit. If Hawke was the drover’s dog, then it is fair to say Keating is what the dog left behind.

Like a lot of things in this country, the ALP is a poor imitation of what it once was. I’ve always been Labor – very Right-wing Labor – but if the shower of shit they are raining down on us now is all they have left to offer, then bugger it, I’ll join the bloody Liberal Party.

I think my trouble is that I have become a bit of a sceptical old dinosaur. I’ve seen too much and I’ve become jaded and very suspicious. The world is changing and I don’t seem to be changing with it. The prison system is no longer the way it was, the criminal world is no longer the one I grew up in, and the police of today do not possess the same sense of poetic justice and black comedy the rough-as-guts old bulls seemed to have when I was a young up and comer. And the Labor Party is no longer the party it once was.

The whole nation is turning gay or green in a vomit of political correctness. Everyone’s torn up their Smokey Dawson membership cards and tossed them in the fire, half the country couldn’t tell you who Banjo Paterson or Ned Kelly were, and the whole nation is steaming full steam ahead into the 21st century to the electric hip hop beat of some Yankee Doodle basketball music … and I’m just walking backwards in the other direction ‘back down that track to an old fashioned shack’ to the Aussie land of my memory.

Anyway, back to Michael Hodgman, who I left stranded about a page ago. The point of all this is that he had that same old-time feel and personality of a knockabout Trades Hall Council boss, a real true believing red rag Labor man.

A real knockabout fighter for the underdog with none of this old school tie, toffy-nosed Liberal crap about him, he sat in front of me talking about my appeal and I sat there wondering how the hell he got into the Liberal Party. Maybe it is because in some ways his personality is not unlike my own, although I am clearly better looking. Maybe he should be Prime Minister and I could be Treasurer. Anyone who didn’t pay their taxes, off with their toes. Putting a few spivs on the missing list would help clear the unemployment rate.

Michael Hodgman can talk the leg off an iron pot, but he makes plenty of sense. I felt very confident about him. I want to say that it was disconcerting but it was a bit strange. There I was in a small interview room talking about my legal problems with a man who could quite easily become the next Premier of Tasmania or the Attorney General. I haven’t made any rash statements about victory, but I am very happy to have this rough diamond on side. I only wish I had him at my High Court appeal.

I’ve noticed that the Liberal Party and its political arm are gathering men into its ranks that could have easily gone very well in the Labor Party, and the poor old ALP is becoming more and more effeminate.

One could hardly imagine the Labor Party membership of today breasting the bar of the John Curtin Hotel 20 years ago.

THE Republican debate is really starting to piss me off. I suspect that the whole thing is a Labor Party plot. A case of no food in the fridge so, to take our minds of what really matters, let’s repaint the house.

I like the Queen of England and the royal family, although a few of the younger ones could do with a blindfold and a last cigarette. The Queen herself is a lovely old dear, but she is the Queen of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern (in name only) Ireland. She is not the Queen of Aussie land. Well, she is, but no-one really takes it seriously, outside the Melbourne Club.

On the other hand, if we became a republic the Queen would no longer be our head of state, yet we would remain in the Commonwealth, and the Queen is the figurehead of the Commonwealth.

I like the sound of a republic, but our legal and political system is, and will always remain very old school tie and English.

Neither the Liberals nor the Labor Party want to give the Australian people a Bill of Rights. Even with all the republican chatter from the Labor Party and his Catholic Holiness, Paul Keating, perish the thought that the Australian public should be given a Bill of Rights.

Mention Bill of Rights and they say we have the constitution to protect us. The same constitution Paul Keating said was drawn up by the British Foreign office as a means to look over our shoulders. So on the one hand, while I applaud Keating and his efforts, I keep thinking the whole thing is a house painting exercise and that in reality nothing will change. The Governor-General will be replaced with a president, the constitution will be changed hardly at all.

The whole thing needs updating and rewriting. I mean if the old is so bad then replace it with something better, not with something almost as bad. What do the people get? Bugger all. That’s what.

Any government that says no to a Bill of Rights should be seriously asked why at the ballot box. A nation that has no Bill of Rights to offer its people believes that the people deserve all the rights in the world except for the ones they don’t want them to have.

I mean what is this problem that Aussie pollies have with introducing a legally binding Bill which states the individual rights of the citizens? At the moment, most people really don’t know what they can and can’t do. They can be so easily bluffed by authority.

The politicians are really quite frightened by the thought of the general public, the great unwashed, having a clear-cut Bill of Rights that the police, the courts, and the public service could not infringe.

Without such a Bill of Rights, the republic talk is total flap doodle.

But, as always, I strongly suspect that the poor old Aussie will get nothing out of this except for a fireworks display paid for by the taxpayer on the night that a republic is declared. There is no doubt about us Aussies … for a few free drinks, a party hat and a balloon with a whoopee-doo fireworks display thrown in every now and again, our politicians can get up us whenever they want.

Viva the bloody republic. What a con.

ON APRIL 9, 1989, two police from Melbourne’s City West police station arrested a minor criminal, Gary Abdallah, and took him back to his flat in inner-suburban Carlton. They had arrested him and were to charge him with attempted murder over an incident where a young man had allegedly been deliberately run over outside a city nightspot
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The two police, Senior Detectives Dermot Avon and Cliff Lockwood, said they went back to the flat to search it for incriminating evidence. Significantly, perhaps, police also believed that Abdallah may have had knowledge about the murder of two police, Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, who were ambushed in Walsh Street, South Yarra, on October 12, 1988
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Avon and Lockwood claimed that while searching a first storey bedroom of the Drummond Street flat, Abdallah grabbed a firearm and threatened them. Lockwood emptied his .38 calibre service revolver and then grabbed his partner’s gun to fire a seventh shot, according to their later testimony
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Police later found the gun the two police said they were threatened with was an imitation .357 magnum revolver. Abdallah was shot several times, the last bullet smashed into his head. He fell into a coma and died on May 19
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The two detectives were charged with murder in 1993 in controversial circumstances where they were presented directly for trial and were not given a committal hearing. They were acquitted by a Supreme Court Jury in February, 1994
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Dermot Avon returned to duty but Cliff Lockwood left the force in July, 1994, saying he felt he would always find it difficult to return to street policing as he believed his name would always be unfairly linked to the case
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I suspect I will always be a marked man,’ he said. ‘I want to get on with my life. What happened with the Abdallah matter would never go away. Every time I jumped into the witness box, solicitors would be dragging out the same old allegations.’
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WELL, the Gary Abdallah murder trial case – fiasco, call it what you will – is over at long last. I had nothing against young Abdallah. He was just a young punk kid with dreams and a small local reputation that one suspects he wanted to turn into a large reputation.

I guess you could say young Gazza was on his way up, but you would need to have a rather broad mind and a good sense of comedy to seriously suggest that his urgent desire to climb the criminal ladder meant that he would ever have got to the top.

If it had not been for his early death, no-one would have heard of him again. But many young up and coming gangsters like him are full of bluff and bullshit, and it seems a lot of them hold this comic idea that if you pull a gun on a copper he will duck, dive and run like hell.

Back in the days when coppers never carried guns and few, if any, criminals ever did, the sight of a firearm would no doubt send the balls running into the underpants, but the Americanisation of the Australian criminal world and police forces in relation to guns has instilled the wild west shoot’em up mentality into both cops and robbers.

Now, if you pull it you had better not be bluffing. There was a case in Launceston in 1993 when a young 16-year-old called Ricky Maynard pulled a replica revolver on two uniformed police and got himself killed.

It’s all got to do with the ‘bluff’ mentality of youth that if you get the drop on them first with a gun, real or otherwise, they will weaken. It is a big bet to place on the table. I’ve noticed that a lot of young would-be toughs have this bluff and bullshit mentality. I guess that’s why I’m one of the few crooks who believe Abdallah did pull out that replica .357 magnum. Why? Because if police were going to waste Abdallah they would have put a real hand gun in his hands after the event, and would have done the job with one or two clear shots.

Seven shots is obviously the result of blind panic, not cold blood and clear thought, and loading a bloke up with a shitpot replica after you have wasted him with seven shots is only turning a simple thing into a bloody nightmare that no-one will believe.

I find it impossible to believe that Lockwood and Avon were incapable, due to lack of connections, of laying their hands on a real handgun or sawn-off shotgun to load up Abdallah, had they wanted to do so.

A real gun in Abdallah’s hand and it is case closed, police valor medals and free drinks all round. But a bloody replica? That would only ever lead to a never-ending nightmare. None of it adds up. That’s why I believe, in spite of popular underworld opinion, that silly Gary probably did pull the replica gun on the coppers and go for the big bluff. You would have to have more bluff than brains to do it, but when you think you are in a corner you play the hand you have got and Gary tried to bluff a joker against a deck of aces, poor bugger.

I feel sorry for him, but why did he do it? Then again, if Lockwood and Avon did murder Gary and load him up with a replica then I am sure they will get theirs, as life gets everyone in the end.

I was once attacked by a crazy Greek wielding a plastic rubbish bin and I was holding a sawn-off shotgun. People flip out when they think they are in a corner. I think the boy just flipped out and went for whatever he could lay his hands on, and it proved a very fatal error of judgment. It’s all a bit sad. Oh well, as the Chinese say, we live in interesting times. Except for Gary and his mate Jed Houghton, that is. In the end they found out that keeping bad company can give you lead poisoning.