Chopper Unchopped (185 page)

The group was sitting in the shade under the giant lemon tree in the courtyard of the Don’s villa in Montelepre. He was very old and wanted only to sit and drink grappa. The bodyguards sat with him, and around the courtyard stood a handful of silent, hard-faced Sicilian gypsies carrying loaded rifles. Palermo was in uproar as the Delle Torre clan and Baldassare clan had gone to war with each other over control of the Aspanu clan.

Don Hector had ordered that his favourite grandson, Little Hector, be taken to safety in the hills with his gypsy friends.

The Don had ordered the death of his remaining sons and grandsons, using the squabble between the Delle Torre and Baldassare clans over the family empire as a smother to kill off Aspanu family members he considered surplus to requirements. He knew they would never be able to run the clan properly. They were spoilt, greedy yuppies and he was ashamed of them. That is why the old Don had loved Joey so much. Joey was the only one who could have run the family.

“You know who I blame for the down fall of La Mafia?” he asked suddenly.

“No” asked Franco. “Who?”

The men smiled, sensing one of the Don’s jokes.

“Mario fucking Puzo and Giorgio fucking Armani, that’s who. Between the two of them every Italian criminal in the world is now more interested in what they fucking wear than who they kill, and real life Mafia guys are now trying to imitate Hollywood. The whole thing is too much for me.”

One of the stony-faced gypsies walked up and whispered in the Don’s ear. The old man nodded and laughed. He raised his glass and said “E nomine patre et file espiritus santos. My sons are all dead.” The men looked at each other. The old man sitting with them in the shade drinking grappa and making comedy about seagulls and push bikes, Mario Puzo and Giorgio Armani, was one of the few Mafia dons left on earth who could order the death of his own children so control of his clan not fall into their hands. This was the action of a Caesar. Were they witnessing the death of the last true Sicilian? All Don Hectors men knew that when the Don died they would either all die with him if they didn’t attack in the name of the Don’s hand-picked grandson and continue to defend the Aspanu clan until the boy came of age to take control. The men were determined to march forward carrying the corpse of the old Don on their shoulders.

“So,” said the Don thickly, “what do we know about the cocksuckers who shot Joey?”

Luigi Monza replied to this question.

“It was the two Victorian policemen, Padrino. Drug squad. A couple of mad Irish. A detective called Herbert Hannigan and his boss, an Inspector Barry Mann.”

“Who did you say?” asked the Don.

“Hannigan,” replied Monza.

“No, no, the other one” asked the Don.

“Mann,” replied Monza. “Barry Mann.”

The Don started to laugh. “What’s funny?” asked Franco.

“Bomp de bomp,” laughed the Don. “Poor Joey got killed by the man who put the bomp in the bomp de bomp in the bomp de bomp. Ha ha.”

The men looked at each other, puzzled by this mumbo jumbo, but not wanting to say so. They hadn’t spent time in America like him. “The old song,” said the Don, still they men didn’t get the comedy.

“Ahh, forget it,” snarled the Don. He was caught in a cultural wasteland. “More grappa.” His glass was promptly filled.

As he reached for his glass his hand shook, he gave a faint groan and his hand fell limply to his side.

The gypsies stood in silence and the men sitting with the Don looked at each other, then at the old man, too frightened to speak.

Monza spoke first. “Padrino, Padrino” he said, but the old man didn’t hear the call. “Don Hector,” said Franco, but the Don didn’t reply. The Benozzo brothers had tears in their eyes. Monza reached out to touch his Don. Franco said, “Don’t wake him.”

Benny Benozzo said sadly. “No, Franco, no-one can wake him now. La Padrino is no more. La morte, la morte.”

THE bell of the Montelepre church rang out and in reply men fired guns into the air. Don Hector Aspanu was dead but not forgotten. His clan and the mafia army he had controlled for half a century rose up and, as the coffin was carried through the streets of Montelepre, gunmen were sent to all parts of Sicily to kill the last of the old man’s enemies. Don Aspanu would not die alone.

As Franco Di Tommaso, Luigi Monza and Benny and Bobby Benozzo stood by the grave of their Padrino surrounded by 700 men of the fourteen separate families that made up the clan Aspanu, Monza asked Di Tommaso “What now Franco, what now?”

Di Tommaso replied: “The Don once told me when we were talking about Joey and his silly chess games that a war may take a hundred years to fight, and in that hundred years there can be a thousand battles. And for every battle we win, we might lose two. But for every man we lose we take two of theirs, for every man who dies leaves a son, a grandson, a nephew, a brother, an uncle or a friend who will pick up the dead man’s weapon.

“We win today, lose tomorrow. The point is, win or lose, we are the one enemy that simply will not go away. They can defeat us for a hundred years, but if we don’t go away then we win. Kill one generation and the next takes its place.

“You see, an enemy who will never surrender is an enemy who will never be defeated. And, as the Don said, in the end that is the Sicilian Defence.”

Chopper’s back to what he knows best. Buried bodies, buried guns, buried money and buried truths. Only one man who’s been on the inside tells it like it is about the hitmen, the bikie wars and the drug syndicates. His peers continue to die violent deaths, but he’s still alive to tell the real story. This is it.

ONE minute I was having a light luncheon inside with Robert Jarvis, the latest member of the Risdon Van Gogh Club. The next, I was whizzed out by prison security. No farewells, no cheers, nothing — but I couldn’t care less. Freedom is freedom and it is the sweetest thing, any way you get it.

Somehow, I don’t think members of the media who had been sweating on my release, then missed it, would agree with that. They were pissed right off. No wonder they missed me outside Risdon. When Peter John Allen was released from Loddon prison he was picked up in a white limo. When I was released, a white prison bus took me through the gates and dumped me outside the Supreme Court in Hobart. Hardly the way to treat a national icon, I would have thought.

ONLY one member of the media had the right idea. Cops and crims have a code that a favour must be repaid, no matter how long it might take. The first reporters to kidnap me were from Mal Walden’s gang at Channel Ten News, and that’s because I owed Mal. He did me a good turn in 1978 and called in the favour twenty years later — hence the nickname ‘The Don’.

You know how it goes: ‘I will do you a favour today and if one day, and I hope that day never comes, I need a favour then I will call on you.’ Well, don’t ever think the Don won’t call on you, because he will.

I could see Mal reading the news in a black shirt and a white tie with a horse’s head doing the weather, or a horse’s hoof at least. It all goes back to the late 1970s. I wrote to Mal, who was then the newsreader with Channel Seven, and requested some news footage of me that my dad wanted. Most TV types wouldn’t have bothered because I was not a hot news story at the time, but Mal did the right thing.

While I was in Risdon he was able to remind me of the past favour. His reporter was the one to get the scoop the day I got out. It didn’t stop the others trying. They soon got on the trail, like buzzards circling a buffalo with a bullet in him.

We had a little car chase with my wife, the lovely Mary-Ann, driving a 4.2 litre Jag with plenty of grunt. As we sped along the back roads of Tassie I couldn’t help but think she was a born getaway driver.

She was behind the wheel of her beloved old Jag, like the ones the Great Train Robbers used. Here was my law-abiding wife, driving like she was part of the Kray gang, trying to burn off a TV crew. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or shoot. So much for my idea of quietly slipping out into the real world without too much fuss and bother.

The second lot to get me after a fifty-kilometre car chase was Kellie Russell of Channel Seven News and her crew. It was madness. Did not these people remember that the last time I got excited in a motor vehicle my former friend and serial liar, Syd Collins, copped a bullet in the belly and I copped a bum rap and an indefinite sentence in jail? A lot of crims copped a bum rap in jail, or so I’m told, but that was just in the showers.

We were at a disadvantage. We were in a Jag that I had spent $17,000 rebuilding, while they drove a hire car which they considered they were duty bound to drive to death. Every rock that spat up and hit our car was $25 into the panel beater’s pocket. When they hit something it was the height of good humour.

We pulled over and young Kellie offered to pay for lunch and drinks, courtesy of Channel Seven. She got her interview and I got a couple of pots and a rump steak. Seemed a fair deal to me.

At least Kellie had the good manners to buy me a beer.

‘Do you have anything to add in closing, Chopper?’ was her last question on the interview.

I looked the long, skinny, blonde kid up and down and replied, ‘Yeah, get yourself a bloody exercise program.’

She nearly fell over and that part of the interview was cut out but she went straight back to Melbourne and enrolled in a gym and, I’m told, has shaped up quite nicely. So much so that I reckon I’ll be a tad more polite when next we meet. Ha ha.

12 FEBRUARY, 1998.I had been at the Hobart Casino at Wrest Point most of the night with one bottle of vodka settled into me and a second bottle trying to stay down but threatening to come back up with my first feed outside jail in six years. I’d won and then lost I don’t know how much money.

Early that morning I’d woken up in the small township of Richmond, Tasmania, badly hung over, to be greeted with a media frenzy. Every mob that had missed me at Risdon, and hadn’t got there in time for the car chase across country was trying to make up for lost time.

A Miss Jackson was desperate to see me, along with a Miss this and a Miss that from this or that news and or current affairs program.

Oh how they love a man with no ears. Right up until the interview is over, at least, all these pretty perfumed things chasing me in their high heels and outfits chosen by TV wardrobe assistants. They are kids, more frightened of coming back to their office without a story and getting knocked off by another reporter than getting the real truth.

They smile and flirt, act wounded and make promises they can’t keep. Dim as they are, they know that a known crim who can make a smartarse crack in front of a camera is much better value than a politician with no dash, so the old Chopper was the biggest ‘news’ story of the day. And I was like an 18-year-old virgin: the more I said ‘no’, the more they chased me.

I knew that if I rang them up in a few months for a favour they wouldn’t return the calls, but at the time I was as hot as Bill Clinton. And, after all those years in jail, nearly as horny.