Chopper Unchopped (10 page)

After the show a Sydney crim who Jimmy knew was talking to Johnny O’Keefe and called us over. So we got to meet JOK. For me it was a great moment. He was a fantastic fellow. And there was a beautiful female singer who also sang for us — Dianna Lee — a lovely blonde lady. We all shook hands and Jimmy got a kiss on the cheek. Johnny O’Keefe was a real knockabout to talk to — and knew quite a few crooks. I guess big stars like him know a million people. Anyway, as we walked away, my tomahawk dropped down from my belt and fell out under my overcoat and clanged on the floor.

Nobody said anything for a long moment, and then Johnny said, dry as you like, ‘I’m bloody glad you liked the show Chopper … I wouldn’t want to be here if you didn’t’. Everyone roared with laughter.

His death was a great loss. He was a top bloke.

While most of the underworld hated Read, he did have his allies. The man who was his closest friend for many years was armed robber, escaper and violent criminal, James Richard Loughnan.

Loughnan was Read’s lieutenant in the Overcoat Gang. They were inseparable. They hatched revenge plots together, and even tried to break out of jail as a team. Loughnan escaped from Pentridge twice and broke both his ankles in a third bid. He was serving 12 years for armed robbery during the height of the prison war.

After one escape in 1974, Loughnan was shot in the back by Box Hill gunsmith, Gordon MacDonald, during a failed armed robbery attempt. In 1978 Loughnan, Read and John Price escaped from H Division and sat on the roof of A Division in a jail protest.

In 1977, while Loughnan was recovering from his broken ankle in H Division, Read was released from jail. He had promised Loughnan he would hatch a plot to get him released. Read marched into the County Court in early 1978 and held Judge Martin hostage at gunpoint, demanding the release of his friend. It was a plan even Read knew was doomed to fail before he began.

For his show of loyalty, Read was sentenced to another 13 years jail. Ironically, the friendship was soured when Loughnan stabbed Read in H Division when even he thought Read was going too far in the Overcoat Gang war.

Read said later that after the stabbing he vowed he would never fully trust another man.

Loughnan was one of five inmates who burnt themselves to death in the Jika Jika Division fire in October, 1987.

WHEN Jimmy Loughnan, Johnny Price and I broke out of H Division a prison officer hit me over the head 15 or 20 times before the baton broke.

I said ‘you’d better carve me up Jim, I’ll go to J Ward Ararat’. I said, ‘if you put enough blood on me yourself, then the screws won’t bother flogging me’.

Looking back, it was a very foolish thing to hand a psychopath a razor blade and ask him to carve me up. He went in so deep it nearly went through to my lungs.

He was a friend of mine, poor old Jim. He died in that Jika fire. What people don’t know is that he was one of two people who stabbed me: he ended up turning on me.

There was an ice pick and a knife used in the attack on me. Poor old Jim hung the ice pick in, but he’s dead now so it doesn’t matter.

Loughnan was a hard man, a real hard man; he was in my gang years ago. Maybe I was going a bit too crazy for them. Back in those days there was a rather mad plan hatched by the Overcoat Gang to literally take over H Division.

We were going to grab the whole division. There was me, Jimmy Loughnan and Amos Atkinson. We were going to take over the division because every enemy we had at the time was in the division in 1979.

We had ice picks, knives, everything. I said right, we’ll grab the whole division, we’ll lock all the prison officers up in the scullery, and we won’t hurt any of them.

This was just after I attacked that judge, so I had 17 years to think about it. I was only 24, young and crazy. I said we’ll take the whole division over, then we’ll grab the keys and go to every cell, pull each enemy out one at a time, and we’ll deal with them.

We were going to deal with them in no uncertain terms, short of death. Anyway, they went away and had a chat about it, Amos Atkinson and Jimmy Loughnan and another bloke. And they came up with the theory that the old Chopper’s gone crazy.

The next day I stepped into the yard and that was it. Amos Atkinson bailed out of the yard. He had held hostages at the Italian Waiters’ club and demanded my release from H Division, and so still couldn’t go all the way against me. He wouldn’t turn on me, but at the same time he wouldn’t warn me that I was going to be attacked either, so he got out of the yard.

They really didn’t have the courage to come to me and say: ‘No, we don’t want to be in it’. If they had said: ‘No, we don’t want to be in it’, I would have said ‘all right’, but they thought I was so off my head at the time that they couldn’t reason with me.

I lost part of my spleen, most of the gall bladder, so many feet of stomach tubing, so many feet of bowel, part of the colon. I got the ice pick in the back of the neck, which nearly severed the spine.

After the operation I was found on the hospital floor doing pushups. You’ve got to understand that they fill you full of pethidine. The day after I had stitches everywhere, tubes in my nose, in my arm and in my penis, but I was also as high as a kite on pethidine.

I did do, I think, 30 pushups. I think I re-split the stitches inside my stomach. I did it just to prove that I hadn’t been got at. The reason I tell you this, is that no-one did a day’s jail over the attack. It was declared a case of self-defence and it’s now ancient history.

I don’t want to say much about Jimmy Loughnan. When I got stabbed in H Division in 1979 I went from an 18-stone giant to a 14 stone weakling overnight.

The treachery of Jimmy’s actions that day upset my mental wellbeing and I still remember it as if it was yesterday. The stabbing was nothing. Big deal, you get over that, although I never did regain my physical stature. Prior to that I was 18 stone of rock. To think that I was doing 13 years for trying to get Jimmy out of J Ward Ararat. Ah well.

I saw Jim again in late 1983 when I came up from Jika. I was walking past B Division to go to the clothing store. There was Jimmy, standing in front of B Division. He couldn’t fight, but he wasn’t a coward, so he stood his ground and braced himself for the expected bashing.

I walked up and kissed him on the cheek and said: ‘Don’t worry Jimmy, I’m not going to hurt you. Your own life will destroy you’.

He said: ‘Yeah, I know it will’.

As I walked away he called out to me, ‘It wasn’t personal, Chopper’.

I kept walking and didn’t turn back. I had tears in my eyes. Why didn’t I kick him into a bleeding jelly? The bloke had been my best friend since 1975. He was my brother. I loved him like a brother. I wasn’t angry and I didn’t hate him; he just broke my heart.

I saw him once more after that in K Division about two days before the fire. I saw poor Robert Wright the very day before. He said: ‘We’ve got something going Chopper, you’ll love it. It will be good for a laugh’. Poor mad buggers.

The whole reason I went into the court that day and grabbed Judge Martin was all to do with my friendship with Loughnan. I was trying to get Jimmy out of J Ward Ararat. He was writing to me, pleading with me to get him out. I once promised him in H Division, and I always keep a promise to a friend.

He had just escaped from jail and broke both his ankles, when he jumped the fence. He was in the yard there, it was raining, he was crying and his feet were blue, and he thought he was going to lose both his feet. He had four, five or six years to go. I said, ‘listen Jim, when I get out, give me about six months, then write to me and then I’ll come and get you’.

He said, ‘you’ll be out eating pizzas and drinking beer and you won’t want to give that away to help me’. And I said I would. And when he wrote to me the truth was, he was right, I didn’t want to give it all away. I didn’t want to attack that judge and it really was a half-hearted effort.

The thing was that I had given my word that I would do it. Back when I was 24, that was very serious to me, that I had sworn, on my friendship to Jimmy Loughnan, that I would try and get him out.

When he wrote to me, I was having a good time. I didn’t want to walk away from all that but I had given my word, and I was obliged to go through with it. So I went and did what I did, and naturally I got caught.

If it had worked I was going to surrender myself anyway, so it was certain jail — win, lose or draw. I don’t know if I was insane; I can’t think on that level now. I had a deep sense of friendship, but over the years the more knives that got stuck in my back and the more times I was betrayed, that sense of friendship becomes less and less.

I remember I was living with a girl named Lindy at the time. I remember kissing her goodbye on that morning and then ‘Dave the Jew’ drove me to the court.

I went into the County Court building with a shotgun stuffed down the front of my pants. I asked a policeman there which courts were in session. He told me and I walked into the first one I saw. Judge Martin was the first cab off the rank. I climbed onto the judge’s bench, put the gun to his head and demanded Jimmy’s release. I knew it could never work but I had given my word to try.

I remember after it was all over I wrote to Judge Martin and said I was sorry and he wrote back to me. I no longer have the letters, but it seems I had met him at the Melbourne Cup in November 1977 a few months before. He was very concerned for me and wished me all the very best for the future. I thought that was very nice of him. I had no ill will towards him. It was all to try to get Jimmy Loughnan out of J Ward.

I wouldn’t attack a judge now, to get anyone out of jail, because too many people have betrayed me. Too many people have stabbed me in the back. Too much has happened to me. To be stabbed by the same bloke that I tried to get out of jail is a terrible lesson, a good lesson, but a hard way to learn. So the Mark Read of then is not the Mark Read of now. We all grow, don’t we?

Jimmy Loughnan escaped quite a few times from Pentridge simply because he tried so many times. I’ve only tried once, and I knew it was a stupid idea even before agreeing to go along. No one else would be in it, but I had nothing better to do.

Here is what we did. Me and Jim got ourselves nailed into a small crawl space between the roof of the B Division library and the B Division theatre. We had to then cut our way through the floor of the theatre, cut our way through the bars of the theatre window, climb down then get over the wall.

It sounds simple. We took a bottle of water mixed with cordial, four bags of lollies, some chocolates — and a butcher’s knife. We were, by the way, going to cut through the theatre floor with the bloody butcher’s knife. It was all so hopeless. We had half a hacksaw blade to cut the bars of the theatre window. And we had to hide in the crawl space, nailed in with no way out except the theatre floor, hiding from the screws. We were supposed to hide for a good 24 hours before we made our move …

I shook my head when I heard the plan, but went along with it for the sheer hell of it. The things one does in the name of friendship.

We were in the crawl space. The night muster bell rang and the screws were alerted that two were missing. A big search started for us — there were bells ringing, the whole bit.

Jim wanted to take a piss. Then he wanted a lolly. Then he wanted a chocolate, then a drink of cordial. We’d been hiding four hours and Jim had eaten all the supplies, drank half the water and cordial and taken three leaks. And there was hardly any air. What a fiasco.

God, I was glad when they found us.

Postscript. There is a file photograph of old Squizzy Taylor standing next to his bail bondsmen, a Richard James Loughnan. That was Jimmy Loughnan’s grandfather.

Jimmy was one of two brothers. His younger brother Glen Loughnan hanged himself in the family shed on the same day Jimmy was shot in Box Hill by gunsmith Gordon MacDonald, or Gordon the Gunnie as Jimmy later called him.

WHY did I choose to become a toecutter, a man who lived by torturing other criminals and robbing them? It is the highest risk area of crime with regard to life and death. But, for a start, I find the selling of drugs to be a girlish, limp-wristed way to earn one’s living. It is the wimp’s way to gain wealth and power. Why should I steal drugs when I can simply rob the drug seller?

No-one ever informs on the toecutter for the crime of torture. They cannot stand up in court against me when they have no feet to stand on — and if they did stand up they would have to be held by the undertaker, because they’re all dead. What I have been arrested for are acts of loyalty for fallen comrades, or personal revenge, or acts of underworld violence as a result of war — never for operating as a toecutter.

If you get to the frontline of a war you can be the safest. As a toecutter, I am hated in the criminal world and everyone wants me dead. But, as I’ve mentioned before, often the hunted man lives the longest.

The criminal world is a cesspit of vomit. I choose to stay on top of my own ladder, where I can pick my targets more clearly. It is cleaner in the end.

I am not a ‘bounty hunter’, as I have been called. The criminal term for someone like me is a ‘headhunter’. The term ‘headhunter’ is a purely Australian criminal slang term for someone who lives off the big crooks.

Having spent all my teenage and adult years in the criminal world, both inside and outside prison, I have grown to despise and loath the mainstream criminal population, for they are nothing but weak-gutted mice. They have no sense of personal honour and courage. The average police dog has more guts and brains than the average member of the criminal world. If there is such a thing as a criminal snob then I am one; I look down my nose at the rest.

People with the drugs and the money call the shots. They have got people working for them who, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t urinate on them in the street because the big boss is so weak — but because he has the drug connections and he’s got the money he calls the shots. Some weak, insipid, effeminate, despicable character becomes the one who thinks he can run the show.

It makes my stomach turn.

To me toecutting, or headhunting, is the cleanest, purest form of crime, and the headhunter stands alone. The average criminal has the mentality of a pack runner. The headhunter has the mentality of a lone wolf. I will not miss the criminal world or the criminal life. That is why I can walk away and never look back.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I had been in trouble with the police but I didn’t think of myself as a real crim. I was a street fighter and a bloody good one. Then I started to think that I could use that ability to turn over a dollar. I started standing over people who were themselves on the wrong side of the law. It started with the massage parlours and brothels, robbing the blokes who ran the parlours in the early 1970s and robbing the SP bookmakers, the card schools, the gambling clubs and baccarat schools. So much to do and so little time in those days.

The thing was, you’d get into these joints and you’d find rubbish bin bags full of ‘grass’, piles of it everywhere. Well, they thought that I was quite funny, because I was ignoring the grass and going for the money. I had a great deal of trouble getting the money out of them — until I got the bright idea of setting fire to their dope. The first time I found heroin in a massage parlour I tipped it out and asked what it was.

There were people literally crying on the floor, on their hands and knees on the floor. I remember once, I had a handful of those red and white caps of heroin and I was throwing them out on to Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, and people were on their hands and knees trying to get them. And I was laughing my head off. I couldn’t see what it was about.

People who are not on heroin would throw it down the dunny; they would rather have a cup of tea. But for people who are on it or selling it, you would swear that you had taken their mother and thrown her on the street. It’s pathetic really.

Drugs were never my go. I wouldn’t steal drugs because I would have to re-sell them. All I would have to do is grab the drugs and demand say, $10,000, or the drugs were down the toilet. It worked all the time. What could the dealer do: go to the coppers and say ‘Big bad Chopper has flushed a kilo of my smack down the dunny’? No way known.

Any criminal who talks about money is a fool. If you have to brag about something, talk about women or the size of your gun, but never discuss financial matters, because if the police or the tax man doesn’t overhear your boasting, the toecutters surely will. Because I have been full on in crime for the past two decades, my years behind bars have been long. But my time outside, short as it has been, has been very profitable. However, if you want to know whether there is big money in it, the answer is no. After a lifetime of blood and guts torment I haven’t got a cracker to my name.

It is bloody pathetic really. I don’t have a brass razoo. I have blown it all in less time that it took me to make it. Paying people to keep their mouths shut: wives, girlfriends, sisters and mothers of chaps that I have had run-ins with, pay-offs to get information on targets or as part of revenge campaigns, buying weapons. This is not cheap. Hiring cars, flats, motel rooms, pub rooms, renting places to be used as interrogation rooms, money for shady doctors, financing long-range campaigns, slings and backhanders and repaying debts to friends and helpers. The result is a bit left over for a counter lunch and a few beers while I wonder where it all went.

For example, in 1987, I was standing over ethnic card games in the western suburbs. I would collect about $200 a week from six places. I also collected money from a couple of SP bookmakers, about $200 a week each. I had a handful of massage parlours paying me between $250 to $500 a week, not for protection, but because the parlour bosses wanted me on their side.

I was also collecting a $200 to $300 a week sling from several Melbourne nightclubs, because the owners wanted to keep me sweet. I had the same arrangement with a few nightclubs in the western suburbs. Basically it worked out to about $3000 a week in slings, plus my regular standover money I’d pull off other crims. I would average about $5000 on a good week.

After paying off everyone and everything I would end up with about $2000 a week for myself; yet I always ended up broke.

Even when I was doing special $20,000 torture jobs, mounting the operation could cost money. The truth is I have always been a very poor money manager. Financially speaking, I was a very small-time crook who tortured millionaire crooks for chicken feed. I was in it more for giggles than gold.

Oh, I’m a crook, all right, but I live off other crims. Within every fish tank there is a shark, within the ocean there are sharks, within the criminal world there are sharks, within any jail there are sharks. What I mean is, if any of these nitwits went over to America they wouldn’t last five minutes because there would be a Chopper Read on every tier in every jail. If they went to New York they’d be meeting Chopper Reads on every street corner. They should thank God that they live in Melbourne.

Crims here have been getting around like a protected species. Where’s the real harm in what I did? I know that many people, including some police, were quite happy when I dealt out a little bit of ‘poetic justice’ to some filthy drug pusher. This is what gets me; these crooks have guns and they’re willing to put a gun at your head and take your money, willing to beat you to shreds. But if Chopper Read gets them in the lounge room afterwards and nails their hands to a coffee table and says ‘where’s the money?’ they scream ‘injustice’. They scream ‘foul play’. They scream ‘we’re being picked on, we’re being tormented and our money is being taken off us’.

Do you honestly think this attitude of ‘we’re honest crims, you can’t come and take our money,’ would be tolerated in London, New York or Belfast? What do they scream about me for? What I have done for years is now the accepted thing, because now the crims are feeding off each other. They have become cannibals. The dope dealers are all robbing each other, the bank robbers are robbing each other, the massage parlour owners are standing over each other, the nightclub owners are standing over and robbing each other.

They see it in on American TV shows and they say, ‘Oh gee, that must be the way they are doing it over there; it must be the way to go’. I know it sounds ridiculous but they all try to emulate American television. The number of crims who have got the
Scarface
video at home would make you laugh.

My reputation in the criminal world has always been based on other people’s hatred, fear and paranoia. My image has been made by my enemies, whereas a host of big-name crooks have reputations which come from their friends, admirers and hangers-on. These so-called gangsters have all created images and reputations they don’t deserve. But a reputation that has come out of a sea of hatred can be believed. Why would the men who hate someone praise him unless the truth was so overpowering they had no other choice?

Nothing my enemies say about me can hurt me, as I have no popularity to lose. My friends and loved ones will not fall into a tearful heap on hearing or reading some slander about me, as that is all they have ever heard anyway.

I welcome the news every time I hear that some misguided individual has stated that he will kill me or that there is a contract out on my life or that he knows of men eager to finish me off. For although he doesn’t realise it, he is offering me a brilliant plea of self defence at any future murder trial.

It could be said that the amount of pure naked hatred against me by Crown witnesses at my murder trial and the general feeling of ill-will against me that the jury saw in the court room must have helped me. When a man as hated as me kills, then a plea of self defence is not that hard to accept.

In my enemies’ rush to condemn me, to destroy me with venom and outrage, they have, in fact, almost given me a legal licence to kill — in self defence of course. The plea of self-defence is rarely used in court and believed even less. In my case it is simply a case of some poor bastard trying to kill Chopper Read again (yawn) as these plots against me are considered common place.

If I have so many enemies, who can I trust? As far as trust is concerned, the old saying that there are no friends in business applies 100 fold in the criminal world. In the name of self-interest and survival most men will betray a friend to save their own skins, or further their own ends. There are a few men who are exceptions to this rule, even fewer in the criminal world.

Chopper’s golden rule is that when the shit hits the fan, keep an eye on the people closest to you. The graveyards are full of blokes who got put there by their friends.

All my life I have looked at everything as a fight and I have developed my own theories and opinions about people. I have developed what I have called the Psychology of Fear. I have taken the eye teeth out of every book of tactics, strategy and combat I have read and used what I have learned on the streets and the criminal world. An enemy can cripple itself with its own fear. My Psychology of Fear works because no-one knows that I am manipulating the situation to create that fear. Everyone fears the unknown; everyone gets a jump in their hearts out of a bump in the night. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die first.

One of my earliest readings was Dale Carnegie’s book
How to Win Friends And Influence People
and I have developed my own twisted version of it. Part of my tactic is to create anger and outrage in the mind and the heart of the enemy, as that is the first and most stupid emotion a man can have. At first you can’t hurt an angry, outraged man — but you don’t want a cool-headed enemy, either. You must create confusion through mind-numbing misinformation until your target doesn’t know what to believe anymore. After anger and confusion comes paranoia, and a paranoid enemy is a comedy to watch.

Then, through the use of personal contact via the telephone or even a nice card or flowers you can turn up the heat. Bumping into their old mother with a warm smile and a hello, and asking her to pass on your regards to Sonny Boy. Paranoia and fear combine to create an almost crippled mental state. The war at that stage has been won, and I haven’t left my lounge chair.

The actual physical part of this form of combat via a death or act of violence is a small part. It is the very last move on the chess board. I play this game over a period of time to create the maximum tension and stress. If there are drugs at hand, the enemy may partake to steady his nerves. To ease the tension he may take a drink and all the while he is talking and talking about me to his followers, creating further paranoia and panic in the minds of his friends.

What we now have is a heavily armed group of rich and powerful underworld heavies in a state of almost comical paranoia and fear. I like to keep this up for at least a year; all the while I am at ease and they are on guard ready for the pending attack. But the attack doesn’t come. Every man or group can only stay in a mental and physical state of siege for so long. In jail, I have seen enemies attempt suicide over this tactic and a few have succeeded. On the outside they may leave the state or offer me gifts of money.

The next step is an act of violence through a night of assorted shootings, never directed at the main target, but at people near and around him. At this point he is ready to give you half, if not all, of what is his. If that fails I give a short burst of misinformation to mislead and confuse. By this point he has reached mental collapse. Then, as a wise man once said, ‘kill one, scare one thousand’. Even the strong and strong-minded can fall victim, as they can’t realise it is happening to them. They can’t separate the mind game from the reality. The Psychology of Fear.