Chopper Unchopped (12 page)

THE court system in Australia is not what it seems. By that I don’t mean it’s corrupt in the way of cash corruption. The Americans and South Americans may have to pay a fortune to get what we get free here under the ‘Old Mates Act’.

Australia has the old school tie in reverse syndrome. Justice Lionel Murphy summed up the Australian legal system here in just five words: ‘What about my little mate?’.

As for fixing a trial. If I could fix a race horse as quick and easily as a Crown witness then I’d be a millionaire.

All it needs is for a non-threatening person to approach the Crown witness — a man of the cloth of any denomination is my favourite — and simply say: ‘Look, no-one is dirty on you. We all understand the situation you’re in. It’s all sweet now, you can pull out of this’.

The message is simple. Come home, all is forgiven; that sort of thing.

If the witness can’t do that, then it is taken one step further: ‘Look, give your evidence but screw it up. Make a 100 mistakes, forget things. That way you have kept your bargain with the police and the Crown and no-one is dirty on you. The accused walks, no blue, no problem, all is well. Just screw up your evidence’.

A ‘got-at’ Crown witness is actually better than no Crown witness at all. The worst Crown witness is a truly frightened one or a really angry one.

Sweetening a Crown witness is a bloody must in my book. Everyone has a wife, a mother, a sister or a girlfriend. They get the message: give your evidence, but screw the guts out of it and everything will be sweet. No big deal; it goes on all the time.

Any Crown witness taken from the criminal world is a liar anyway, so getting him to tell a few lies for the defence as well as the prosecution is like falling off a log.

The game of let’s make a deal is played in every court house in Australia, always has been and always will be. Maybe a little cash is handed to the lawyer to encourage him to get in there and see what he can do but the system is based on ‘Can we do a deal, can we make this go away?’.

Near enough is good enough … the easy way out … what about my little mate … he’s one of us … he’s on our side, he’s a good bloke, he’s given us a lot of help … he plays footy for this team or that team … his Dad’s a policeman … he’s in the right Lodge … he’s willing to nod to this if we drop that … any chance of a fine, how about a bond?

Nudge nudge, wink wink. The legal system is a never-ending round of let’s make a deal.

It is not corrupt, but it’s the next best thing and doesn’t have to cost the player a penny. It is a purely Australian thing.

Some of these assorted deals are actually struck at the very door of the court itself. Because no cash changes hands the people playing the game think it is okay. The Australian court room is an old whore and she doesn’t get a penny for her trouble.

It’s the Australian way.

I should thank my legal team who got me out of my murder trial: solicitor Mr Pat Harvey, barrister Mr Boris Kayser and Queen’s Counsel, Mr Colin Lovitt. It was their sterling legal work which helped me beat the charge.

However, God helps those who help themselves and I did walk into the court room with a slight edge. I can now say that I had the assistance of a very ‘confused’ Crown witness. Plus I was a hated man, who most of the criminal world dreamed of killing, and I was pleading self-defence. How could I lose?

They tried to kill me and when that failed they tried to get me life. The fact that I was carrying two guns and wearing a bulletproof vest when Sammy the Turk got his and the Crown had a witness who saw the whole thing, swearing that it was cold blooded murder, didn’t seem to bother the jury, God bless them.

Some of the witnesses were criminals, self-confessed drug users and prostitutes. It didn’t sit too well with the jury. If they had sold tickets to the trial they could have made a lot of money.

It was really a set up to kill me and it was genuinely self-defence, but how I beat it has still got me puzzled.

One of the witnesses was the former de facto of the drug dealer, Nick the Greek, and he advised her to give evidence. He was named in the court by the Crown as one of the four men who put money up to have a contract taken out on me. Personally, I don’t think those nitwits did put a contract out on me. They wouldn’t know how to do it and they wouldn’t have the guts. The Crown witnesses were frantic to have me put away for life. I’m sure their evidence convinced the jury of my innocence.

I have known for many years that if you fill a court room with enough bullshit then the truth can walk in and out of the dock without ever being seen.

There are several big cases where this has been done, but it is a very dangerous game for fools to play.

Never think that the courtroom is the place where the truth is found.

Forgive me. I shouldn’t gloat over such matters.

The reason most guilty men walk free is because poor old mum and dad juries simply find the evidence impossible to believe. That is why crime and the profits from crime is becoming a billion dollar growth industry.

Simply put, Mr and Mrs average Aussie doesn’t really believe it is all happening here. They think it is too farfetched and only happens in America or Colombia or in the movies. Let me tell you it is happening here, madder and crazier than even I could describe.

The Australian criminal world is a totally unbelievable, blood-soaked, insane, comedy of errors. It is filled with the most unrealistic, nuttiest collection of murdering, drug-running, movie-watching Walter Mittys you will ever find.

By comparison, I think my story is quite a simple one. Some people think of things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. But the real world is made with shades of grey. That is the world where all men have to walk, especially those in the criminal world.

For example, in 1977, I had to meet a group of men at the Morning Star Hotel in Prahran in relation to a matter concerning Billy Longley. They were police officers, with the standover figure Brian Kane acting as some sort of middle man.

Kane patted me down. I had a sawn-off shotgun on me, but I was only patted down for a wire or listening device. The shotgun was allowed. In short, the police were very concerned about rumours and stories that I was about to launch forth a revenge war against some of the dockers on behalf of Billy. They were concerned that innocent people could be hurt in the crossfire.

They were trying to stop a war before it started because they did not want another bout of bloodshed. These police were honest men. However, in the name of the greater common good they were prepared to turn a blind eye to outstanding matters in relation to myself. They even understood my need to carry a gun. Kane was also armed at the time.

What the police were doing was trying to stop a bloodbath before it happened and, therefore, save innocent lives. But if that meeting in the back bar of that pub had been discovered, the police would have had no option but to claim that Brian Kane and Chopper Read were informers so they could cover themselves, as the truth of the meeting could hardly be revealed.

Police are not legally empowered to call warring underworld factions together for shifty, under-the-counter peace deals. But, regardless of that fact, meetings and secret arrangements which can save lives on both sides of the fence were and are made all the time.

There are grey areas where police and criminals are forced to walk now and again in the common interest. Sometimes there can be a common enemy or a common interest, such as when a small child is raped or kidnapped. That is when all previous bad blood can be put aside for the common good. These deals will never be admitted in a million years but nothing is ever black and white.

There are all sorts of under-the-counter meetings between police and criminals. The crims are not necessarily acting as informers and the police are not taking bribes. However, neither side would like these meetings, deals, or arrangements to be made public. The problem is, from the official point of view, is that the only legal reason that a policeman has to meet a criminal, other than to arrest him, is if the crim is an informer.

The modern police force discourages the secret meetings that have been held in the past. If meetings had been called early in the game then Walsh Street and Russell Street could have been avoided.

The under-the-counter secret arrangement saved many lives in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. The old-timers can tell of peace meetings between different warring factions that have involved the police.

The biggest one I can remember being told about was after the murder of Freddie ‘The Frog’ Harrison. The entire back room of a Port Melbourne Hotel was locked off with drinks and light eats provided.

The Dockies used to put barrels on for the talks. The Press was never invited and the Chief Commissioner would not be welcome. It was held on neutral ground at one time about once a month. Even an escaped convict could walk in and walk out and not be arrested. The idea was to sort out any shit before it cost lives. The only reason that I didn’t put about 20 gallons of petrol into Lygon Street after shots were fired at me in 1987 was because of an under-the-counter meeting which sorted it out.

I have never heard of a crim refusing to attend one of the meetings.

The police no longer call these under the counter back bar meetings. Meanwhile the death toll mounts up.

It is my firm opinion every main player in the Australian underworld has to have some form of a relationship with certain key people within the police forces. If that relationship is caught out then the police can only offer the excuse that the criminal is an informer. This is not always the case. And the police involved are not always corrupt, either.

The game of cops and robbers is a strange one; I understand even the KGB and the CIA meet now and again to clear up certain unresolved matters, and it’s like that in law enforcement.

When I was last out of jail I had a relationship with certain members of the Armed Robbery Squad. The police concerned were Rod ‘Rocket’ Porter, Steve ‘Dirty Larry’ Curnow, Bryan (whose nickname is too foul to quote) Cook, and Barry ‘The Boy’ Hahnel, who later went to jail himself.

I will sum this relationship up by saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and I feel they shared the same view. In the court they had their version of events and I had mine, but as both sides know the truth and court rooms don’t always mix.

I must say now that all the dust has settled and all the mud has been thrown, that I hold no personal ill will towards any of them. I would like to remind them, however, of our first conversation, ‘When you shake hands with the devil, you can’t complain about a little blood on the footpath’.

I always found Rocket Rod Porter to be a good bloke. He never took drugs in his life but when he was in my company he used to get a little worried. It may have been that I liked to tease him. I said to him once, ‘I don’t know what you are on, but if we had a pound of it we could make a fortune’.

When we were in a pub I would talk in a really loud voice and he would look around and say ‘Keep your voice down, you mad bugger’.

I nicknamed him ‘clockwork orange’ because he was easy to wind up and he would turn red when he got embarrassed. When they fitted me out with the bullet proof vest after a good session at the Fawkner Club Hotel it was a total comedy. It was in a little park behind the St Kilda Road police complex about 10.30 at night. A few hours later Sammy the Turk was no more.

They later denied any knowledge of me carrying a gun. For Christ’s sake, I wouldn’t meet my dear old mother without a gun.

A lot of know-all crims who decide to rabbit on about things they really don’t know about come out with the old line about corruption and big cash bribes. Basically it is pure bullshit; they’ve been watching too much American TV.

I’ve met a hell of a lot of police in Melbourne who I would describe as ‘open minded’ and ‘liberated thinkers’ when it came to inter-criminal violence and bloodshed. They didn’t mind turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to ‘poetic justice’ and the common good, but as far as bribery is concerned, the only crims I know who claim to have bribed police with big money are all serving long jail terms. You figure it out.

It does go on, but it comes undone just as quickly. It is an area only fools enter into and is not popular in Melbourne. The handshake over a few beers and a personal arrangement between the two sides to work out a problem under the counter is the way most things are done. Cash bribes are just too damn risky, stupid and dangerous. The bribe is not trusted in Melbourne. Almost every idiot that gets involved in cash corruption comes undone because the Aussie has never trusted it. It is not the Aussie way.

As far as bribe-taking police are concerned, I wish they were listed in the Yellow Pages, because I’m buggered if I was able to find any of them when I want them. The only time I ever offered a bribe to a copper to fix a problem was in 1987, when I offered $20,000 — and got a knock back.

People are more interested in finding out the easiest way to solve a problem than making money from corruption. With corruption comes paranoia: people fear they will be betrayed and they lose trust. Then the deal collapses with someone spilling their guts.

When you meet with police, if you were to offer them money they would say, ‘Hang on, we’re not bent’. If the police offered the crims money they would say, ‘We’re not working for you’.

The only time money raised its ugly head when I was involved with the Armed Robbery Squad was when Rocket Rod Porter and I had to work out whose shout it was at the bar.

Sometimes the sides can get together to screw the umpire and a cent never changes hands.

I think that police in Melbourne are more enthusiastic over blood and guts than the ones in Sydney. But NSW coppers are far quicker to put their hands out for a sling.