Chopper Unchopped (186 page)

IT is half past one in the morning with Mary-Ann asleep and my two cats Poop Foot and Ernie sitting with me by the fire, keeping me company while I write. Between us I suspect we have about twenty seven lives but I fear I may have used nearly all my quota. I am three quarters the way through a bottle of Grants Scotch Whisky — William Grants Family Reserve, to be exact.

I’ve been out of jail for a year and my weight has gone from twelve and a half stone to seventeen and half stone. I was a vegetarian when I was inside and worked out every day and now I’m a middle-aged fat slob chicken farmer badly in need of — you guessed it — an exercise program.

Sorry Kellie, I should have kept my fat gob shut.

This book was to be a crime fiction or faction book. It was to be called
The Calabrian Contract
, and be about the life and death of Melbourne gangster Alphonse Gangitano.

The death of Alphonse, in my opinion, was the height of good humour — but then my old mate Charlie Hegyalji got hit as well. Poor Mad Charlie gets it, then bing, bang, bing, all over Melbourne old friends and enemies were getting it in the neck, and the back, and sometimes in the belly.

I then said to myself, ‘Myself,’ I said, ‘There is no need to do a fiction book on Alphonse and his mob because the truth about the Australian underworld is weirder, funnier and bloodier than anything Hollywood could dream up.’ I also know there is only one person who can write about the storm from inside the eye of the cyclone. And that is exactly what I’m bloody well going to do. So if you want to know what happens with crims in every part of the country, just put your seat in the upright position and get ready for take-off.

Every time something new happened young Kellie Russell would ring me up and ask my opinion on what was going on. It got to the stage that when Mary-Ann said Kellie was on the phone I would go and put on a fresh black tee shirt and go into mourning straight away.

‘Come on, Chop Chop, what’s going on?’ she would ask in her best Woodward and Bernstein style. And, of course, under such pressure I was sure to tell her exactly what I knew.

Even in rural Tasmania I would sometimes get a call from old friends and, sadly, I would then know that some old associate was a walking corpse. There was no point telling old Charlie to watch his back. When your dance card is full there’s nothing much you can do about it other than retire and take up chicken farming. From assault and battery to battery chickens. That’s a joke — actually they’re free range. Naturally. Having spent so long in a cage myself I think it’s a crime if the animals don’t have a little freedom.

The truth is if you told a donkey what I knew he’d kick you in the head for pulling his leg. Crime and criminals and the world they live in does not walk hand in hand with the truth and when big things happen in that world to those people, the police and the media and the rest of the outside looking in all expect there to be a big reason. A big reason for a big police investigation, a big reason for a big story. No one wants to hear that Mr Big was really Mr Not So Bloody Big at all and that he got knocked for an even smaller reason.

Let’s face it. Ned Kelly was only a trumped-up horse thief who rode about Victoria with a bucket on his head. The truth is always smaller than the story, but people love legends so the criminal world, like a lot of other scallywags in the history books, has provided us all with legends, myths, real life, true blue fictional characters.

How do I know? Well, I’m Chopper Read. Would I tell a lie?

Alphonse Gangitano used this to shroud himself in the myth of the Mafia. That same Mafia that used the magic of human fear to turn a lie into a legend, which can be done by small men if the men wishing to do it are hell bent on achieving a result at any price.

A group of dagoes with a few guns is hardly a big deal, but a group of dagoes with guns and with the funny handshake of the Mafia is supposed to be a big deal and we should all get down on our knees before them. I’m not saying that a legend is nothing but a pack of lies. What I am saying is that one cannot create a legend without the help of a pack of lies. We start with some truth, then add lies to build it up. Everyone adds another story to the story until we end up with a skyscraper of a legend. The lies are the glue that hold the whole thing together and as a result the lies within each and every legend are the most secret and protected part of the structure.

Take the Mafia — please. All jokes aside, it began as a group of honourable men who fought for the poor and then it got corrupted into a crime gang. Then idiots like Alphonse tried to jump on board wearing imported clothes, eating garlic and kissing people on the cheeks, and sometimes on the face too.

Eventually the fiction becomes a reality, but Alphonse didn’t flick to the end of the book of his own life of make-believe. It ended with him being shot. Everyone knew what was on the last page but the poor fat slob himself. His fantasy became reality and he ended up dead.

I guess this book, if you bother to read further, is meant to help the reader unravel the sticky mess that holds the legend together. If Alphonse had known what was going to happen would he have lived his life differently, I wonder? I suspect not. He got his picture in the paper. Some people who believed the crap actually treated him with respect. If it wasn’t for the myth he would have been just another used car salesman in a bad suit.

I WAS just re-reading the transcript of my evidence in the inquest of the suspected death of Christopher Dale Flannery. Quite comic reading, if I do say so myself. I was toying with the thought of using it in the book when my train of thought was interrupted (actually it was totally derailed) when a former Miss Nude Australia, Alison ‘Candy’ Downes, came over to walk her dog on the farm. Her dog, Scruffy, and my little puppy, Billy, get on well, so what do I do: continue writing or walk across the paddocks with her? You’re quite right, walking is good exercise, and I need it. Walking the dog beats spanking the monkey any day.

Most men my age would be happy to walk Miss Nude Australia across the paddocks with a dog or two, giving new meaning to the words ‘watch those puppies bounce’. We had two puppies, a fine pussy and half a mongrel all out in the fresh air.

I was in a fine mood until I got home to find the Yankee Clipper, Jolting Joe Di Maggio, had passed away. The keeper of the Marilyn Monroe flame has gone to join the candle in the wind. So why does a scarred-up old chicken farmer like me shed a tear? Well, maybe I’m just an old sentimental softie underneath. I guess that is why I treat the deaths of so-called Melbourne Mister Bigs so lightly. Their impact, if any, was only in the town they lived in.

To hit the big time you have to hit the world, and no Australian crim has ever done that yet. The Kangaroo Gang, with due respect to my old mate Ray Chuck, was world class — but they were just glorified shoplifters over there, and knocking off stuff from some French department store hardly puts them in the Capone class.

Yes, I’m sorry, that goes for Ned Kelly, too. No Australian outside of acting, sports, singing and movie production has yet to hit the world — and certainly no crim. Well, not as yet. So you might forgive my view when I write about these wombats. I have a global perspective, while most of them are nothing but navel lint.

LET us start with Chris Flannery. Mr so-called Rent a Kill — more like Rent a Dill if you ask me. And you have asked me, or you wouldn’t have got this far into the book.

Think about it for a moment, you’ve paid your money for this book, or had it given to you by someone who doesn’t like you much, or you’ve knocked it off. Whatever, if you don’t like it already you can throw it in the bin, but then you’ll never know how it ends and you won’t know if I’ve mentioned you in the next two hundred odd (very odd) pages.

I pause now to yawn about Flannery and, having yawned, I lost my train of thought and decided to go to the pub. I’d rather drink than write about non-events, yesterday’s has-beens …

I’VE returned from the Richmond Arms Hotel (burp) totally shattered and in no mood to write anything. I’m legless, but then again, so is Chris, and less a few other things, too. Ha ha. I was sitting at the bar having ordered my third Melbourne Bitter and having lost my sixth game of Keno. I was wearing Blue Yakka work pants and a white tee shirt and an old pair of slip-on shoes Mad Charlie gave me in 1987. The shoes were holding up well, better than Mad Charlie, as it turned out. The Richmond Arms does not demand formal attire from its patrons, hence I went for the smart casual look.

Although I can find my own company quite fascinating, I could hardly not notice when a young, well put together girl walked past me wearing a skintight black outfit. She got about five or six feet past me and did an about-face. Then walked back past me again to rejoin her friends. She had an arse and a set of hips on her that swung about in a manner likely to cause injury. Da boom, da boom, you know the drill. You don’t have to be Chris Flannery to be stiff, if you know what I mean. I’m sure she got back to her friends and said in a loud whisper, ‘What? The fat bloke in the white tee shirt?’

‘Yeah,’ said someone, ‘that’s him.’

I ignored this slur, sucked in my guts and looked about to see if anyone else in the bar was wearing a white tee shirt. I was the only one.

‘That’s him,’ said another voice.

‘Bullshit,’ said another.

‘Check him out.’

I sensed movement as the swinging hips swung past me yet again, this time standing next to me at the bar and asking for a bottle of sauce to go with whatever food she was eating with the rest of the wombats she was sitting with.

I could sense her looking at me. I stared straight ahead still with my guts sucked in and polished off my can. Then she turned and walked away. I got up and walked out. The fat bloke in the white tee shirt quietly shuffled off down the road and wandered back to his chook farm to continue writing this book only to receive yet another phone call from the movie people wanting me to sign yet another contract.

I’ve taken a few contracts in my time but nothing like the one the movie people keep running past me. I now realise a Sydney trendy in a turtleneck sweater backed by a group of lawyers with more time on their hands then sense is far more ruthless than the Lygon Street mob.

So far I’ve signed over everything bar my eyes and I’d be willing to give those too if it made them happy. I can’t give them my ears because they’ve already been taken.

Movie people don’t mean to be rude, but they do tend to take themselves a tad seriously. The other fellow’s point of view is a mystery to them unless it agrees with their own. They say to me ‘Yes, Chopper’ or ‘Yes, Mark, we can hear you talking’ or ‘we can hear what you’re saying’.

What they really mean is we can hear you knocking, but you can’t come in. The funny thing about rope is that if you give people enough of it they insist on hanging themselves and my smiling face and readiness to agree to the most insane arrangement is not politeness; it’s rope.

So the fat bloke in the white t-shirt agrees to sign away the rights to his own story so that others can get rich. People are concerned that I might make money out of a film about me, based on books I wrote myself. Silly me.

Anyway, back to that dog Flannery. Chris Flannery was never a tough crim or a hard man. He was only ever a mouth. He couldn’t fight. His reputation for violence first reached my ears, when I still had them, back when I was in my teens. Flannery gave it to a very well-known Melbourne street fighter at a party in St Kilda with a broken beer bottle. I won’t name the other bloke, as naming people in matters Flannery could involve them in legal trouble. A lot of people have come to learn that, so I’ll just call him Ray.

Well, Ray had begun drinking at the Waterside Hotel in Melbourne at six in the morning. The Waterside was an early opener. Now this is not something I have picked up secondhand, as Cowboy Johnny Harris and my goodself had been drinking right there with Ray. He was rolling pissed drunk, as Johnny and I both were by midday. Ray piled into a taxi and went off to Fitzroy — The Champion Hotel via the Builders Arms, I’m told. Which were by no means trendy inner-suburban wine bars in those days, I can assure you. Anybody who could hold his own in the bar at either joint was no sugar plum fairy.

Johnny and I went back home, slept and awoke around 8pm, refreshed and ready to head to some mad party in St Kilda. I must say, I didn’t spend that much time out of jail in the seventies and eighties, but when I was out we had a bit of fun.

Owen Boston and Jack Nicola invited us to the turn. Lennie Loft and his crew would be there and most of the Prahran crew as well as Mad Charlie and his lot. We went to the Chevron Nightclub first to fuel up. Big Ray was fast asleep on the footpath outside the Chevron. It was Mad Charlie who bundled Ray into a car and told Archie to drive. Big Ray was out to it. He had already been in a punch-on with Steve O’Brien and Ronnie Walker in Chapel Street, Prahran, and had ten shades of shit smacked out of him.

Poor Ray was having a bad day. It was time for bed. So you can imagine my surprise when at about 2am me and the Cowboy got to the party in St Kilda and we learnt that Big Ray had been attacked with a broken bottle … while he slept in one of the spare bedrooms. He had been taken to the Alfred Hospital.

Who did it? Big tough Chris Flannery and the Sydney Road crew, that’s who. Sydney Road, Brunswick, is a long way to come from just to sneak go a bloke while he slept. It turned out Ray had led the gang that gang-banged some bloke’s sister from that side of town. I didn’t say Ray was a nice person who didn’t deserve a flogging. I’m just saying Flannery attacked him when he was more dead than alive. Also the ‘pack rape’ took place in a massage parlour in Coburg, so it hardly falls into the category of deflowering the singing nun.