Chopper Unchopped (187 page)

When it comes to matters of forcible sex Chris couldn’t really take the high moral ground. Flannery was himself a hetero and a homo rapist. He had done it to both good-looking girls and boys and he built a reputation on violence toward both sexes. Being a firm believer in equal opportunity he’d attacked as many females as males. I didn’t know Flannery and he didn’t know me. We had seen each other, but he never came too close. I mustn’t have been his type.

We moved in the same circles and I think we knew that if those circles clashed it would end in tears. His, for instance.

You see, I didn’t have to stay out of his way. He made it his business to stay out of mine. But we knew a lot about each other. One young man on the way up likes to know the business and the doings of other young men on the way up and when I was sixteen I had men in their twenties asking curious questions about me.

You see, the Chopper was coming up too fast and too hard. When I was sixteen Flannery’s reputation in Melbourne overshadowed my own for violence. When I was seventeen it didn’t. You can achieve a lot in the underworld in a year if you are keen and a little crazy.

By the time I was eighteen Flannery, as far as street violence went, was a has-been. The Chopper reigned and that was that.

Flannery was in and out of prison and trying to enter the world of the Hollywood nightclub gangster, but blood still ruled on the Melbourne streets in those days. Shitkickers who ran nightclubs and massage parlours and got their photos taken wearing suits were considered as dangerous as a poodle with false teeth.

In 1977, when I got out of H Division at Pentridge, Flannery was the part-owner of a St Kilda nightclub. It was a natural career move for him. He was more at home under a silver disco ball than with real hard men. Nightclub owners and pimps, or noons as we called them then, were all the same. A crim who ran a nightclub that hired off-duty policemen to work as bouncers — well, you had to be half a fucking policeman to begin with, didn’t you? That was our attitude, anyway.

Flannery ran the place, but when any of the heavy crews walked in it was free drinks, all on Flannery, but he was elsewhere. The Melbourne crims wiped their bottoms on Flannery and blokes like him, so Sydney was the place to go. It’s always been the place where failed Melbourne crims can make good and the fact that they continue to do so speaks volumes for Sydney, home of the Gay Mardi Gras.

Flannery tried to kill the undercover copper, Mick Drury, but he botched the job. He decided to be king of the kids but he was running red hot and disappeared in May, 1985, and as everyone knows, his body was never found. Many people think they know what happened to him. Maybe he is in a three-piece band with Elvis and Lord Lucan. But I understand and still maintain that his body finished up in a tree shredder.

Many people poo-poo my ideas on this and other matters, but the Sydney coroner who had to investigate what happened had the brains to send his people to visit me in Risdon prison in September, 1994.

The lawyers were paid more than a grand a day. I got a cheese sandwich. I told them that a man who could be trusted told me a well-known Melbourne criminal hit Flannery with a meat cleaver in a car near Seymour and then put him through a tree shredder.

LET us now move toward the rather unsavoury topic of Alphonse Gangitano. Well, what can I say about Alphonse? First off he’s dead and I’m not. And that’s a good start.

I knew him since he was sixteen, when he knocked about Johnny’s Green Room in Carlton. Mad Charlie introduced us. I sold the prick his first sawn-off shotgun. I didn’t want it, Charlie didn’t want it, so we off-loaded it on the posh Italian kid from the flash suburbs. We called Al ‘Posh’ because he went to a posh private school and was a real spoilt brat with a tough guy complex. Everyone knows the type: a bully to kids he could beat and a suckhole to kids he couldn’t.

It was funny. I had no respect for the wobbly-bottomed dago from the word go. I didn’t think much of Alphonse, yet my mate Charlie saw something in Alphonse that I didn’t.

Mad Charlie had a sort of strange respect for Alphonse, but Charlie was always the thinker, the would-be politician, the budding businessman, even then. Alphonse made me laugh. He gave himself the air of a young Mafia boy on the way up and dropped the names of older men, Italian men, Calabrian and Sicilian men. He was a boy in a man’s world and it would end up costing him his life.

The thing was, I grew up in Thomastown in the northern suburbs, the dago capital of Melbourne back then. I went to school with the sons and grandsons of these old Italian guys Alphonse was talking about. Alphonse dropped these old guys’ names five to six years before he ever got to meet them. I know because I asked them.

Alphonse was always a salesman at heart. Sharp, well-dressed, well-spoken, fairly well-educated from a fairly well-to-do family, but a fucking salesman. That’s all. He sold shit and told people it was chocolate. Big deal. Mad Charlie really was a good crim, but Alphonse had conned him, so I’ve got to take my hat off to him. He was very good at what he did, while it lasted.

Holy shit. I have to put my pen down. One of my devil traps just went off. It’s 2am and I’ve got three Tassie Devil traps set near my chook house, just to keep them away from my lovely layers. I’ll just go and check. Just re-read the last few pages, grab a beer and I’ll be back with you. Have a cup of tea or a piss and then we’ll move on.

SORRY about the break in transmission. I’m back again. Poop Foot my cat went in to grab the meat and got himself caught in the cage. He is now by the fire with his brother Ernie.

Stupid cats, they are locked in the house for the night now, so we can get on with it and leave the devils in peace outside. The Tasmanian variety, that is.

Back to Alphonse. As I said, we weren’t always enemies. I didn’t respect him, but we were friendly enough and together with Mad Charlie and others we hit our fair share of massage parlours and nightclubs, and got into hotel brawls and so on. The sort of shit all self-respecting young blokes did in the seventies before they invented Nintendo and Gameboys and needle exchanges. I was nineteen, Charlie was seventeen and Alphonse around the same age.

He could have been younger, I don’t know. I do know that 1974 was the last year Alphonse and I called each other mates.

I remember I used to call him ‘Fat Boy’. He had a fair bit of baby fat on him back then. Probably from his mama’s Italian cooking. She was always fond of her little boy, and he was fond of her.

Charlie had the torch when me, him and Alphonse were robbing the home of a parlour owner thanks to a tip-off from Al. Mad Charlie had turned off the alarm and the power. It was pitch black. We were in the bedroom when Charlie said ‘What the light shines on is mine’. We cracked up. Charlie was holding the torch and what the light shone on was his.

Alphonse didn’t want to be there. He had given Charlie the mail on the burg, but didn’t expect to be invited along. I didn’t want to be there, either, so when Alphonse said ‘someone is coming’, it was just the excuse we needed. Charlie had to escape into the night with us, empty handed.

Then, with Alphonse and myself drinking with about twenty others at a St Kilda nightclub, Charlie went back alone and emptied the place out of approximately thirty grand cash and over a hundred grand in valuables. Alphonse and myself couldn’t say a word. Neither of us were break and enter men.

Charlie had hit the place alone and done well. Alphonse and I had got out too soon the first time round. Alphonse was the gangster, I was the mad man but Charlie was the money maker, even then. Alphonse and I got all the headlines, but Charlie got all the money.

So there you have it. Even as kids we were shaping up into what we would all later become. Me, I’m just a survivor these days. Now Al and Charlie are both dead and the only thing I ambush are Tassie Devils in the chook-house.

DURING the 1974 parlour war in Melbourne, Alphonse used Mad Charlie to great effect. I didn’t know it at the time, but Charlie was acting even then in Big Al’s interest against parlour owners south of the river.

I remember parlours around Carlton, Fitzroy and West Melbourne were out of bounds, according to Charlie.

I robbed them anyway, without Charlie, only to have Mad Charlie fly into some insane rage claiming that my actions would fuck up his friendship with the Italians.

Dave the Jew thought this was high comedy and we would tell Charlie to piss on the Italians. Charlie would laugh and agree with us. It was in the days before political correctness.

‘Yeah, Chopper, fuck ’em, what have they ever done for me?’ he’d say. But that night Charlie would be over in Carlton having coffee and cake with Fat Boy Alphonse, saying sorry.

In those days Alphonse should have laid off the cake, but what does it matter? Cholesterol didn’t kill him, unless the mate who later shot him blew him away with eight cheeseburgers in the back.

Big Al didn’t own the clubs I robbed, but he was copping a regular sling from the owners. The parlour managers weren’t Italian but the buildings were owned by Italians. It was a bit hard for a nineteen-year-old kid, as I then was, to work out. I was robbing from parlours, not working at the UN.

Later it would be drug dealers, but the aim of the game was the same. Black money and plenty of it, from places and faces that made it unlikely people would be too quick to scream to the cops.

Then came the Cindy affair.

Alphonse was seeing this twenty-seven-year old prostitute named Cindy. She worked in a parlour in Carlton and, yes, she had all the right stuff. Bleach blonde hair, long legs, big tits and a Barbie Doll face.

This chick was ten or so years older than Alphonse. She was working for Jeff Lamb, the biggest parlour owner during the 1970s, and meant to be on with him. She was also a favourite dirty girl for a handful of well-known crims from Footscray and the step-daughter of a painter and docker. A top pedigree.

Cindy was also being screwed by various police. She was, dare I say it, a busy little beaver. Many girls have been fixed up by both sides of the law over the years, including Kath Pettingill before she got old and one-eyed. All in all, Cindy knew more people than Alphonse and had a much stronger power base but, as the saying goes, or should go, ‘just coz you suck off a few gangsters don’t mean you are one’.

Cindy and Alphonse had words about Cindy seeing a policeman and Big Al punched her through a glass shower screen, then grabbed her by her hair and ran her face across the broken glass.

Cindy’s working days were over. Within three hours Alphonse was being threatened by a crew of crims from Footscray right out of his league, so who does he run to? Not his Italian mates, and not his own crew in Carlton. He runs to Mad Charlie. Why? Because Charlie had the Jew and me on side.

Charlie’s crew, being us, had total disregard for the criminal old school, so with Charlie promising to sort it out, Alphonse went home and remained there.

It was me and the Jew who went to Footscray on what we thought was a personal favour for Charlie. No mention of Alphonse. We were doing a good turn for Mad Charlie who was also home in bed. We smashed these pricks in Footscray so hard with claw hammers that to this day I still don’t know how any of them lived.

Two days later Alphonse and Mad Charlie were out from under their doonas and we went drinking in hotels in Footscray again. It was only then that I knew it was all a favour for Alphonse. Thank God the Jew wasn’t with us when I was told or the story of Mad Charlie and Alphonse would have ended then and there. The Jew, bless his heart, can be particularly excitable, especially when he doesn’t take the medication.

As it was, my lukewarm friendship for this Italian false pretender was beginning to turn into a very strong dislike. I suppose I could list pub and club brawls where Mad Charlie and myself had backed the Dago turd up, but why bother? The last time 1 saw Alphonse in 1974 he had just lifted $200 out of some poor girl’s handbag at a Melbourne nightclub and him and Mad Charlie and a crew of Carlton leftovers were off to spend the profits. I declined and went to join my own crew with Dave the Jew at a club in Prahran. Alphonse would run true to form for the next 24 years, always hitting the easy targets.

I wasn’t to see him face to face again until 1977.

IF Melbourne ever had a true Mr Big of crime, of vice at any rate, Peter Thomas Evan Rand deserves the championship belt. Not that you’d think so to meet him. A homosexual millionaire from an old money Melbourne family, the son of the late Sir Thomas Rand, Peter the Poof, or ‘Pam’ Rand as he was comically known, controlled Melbourne’s vice world with a perfumed lace hanky held in an iron fist.

He passed away on October 7, 1997, aged 74, after a long battle with cancer. I’ve attempted to include Peter in other books but doing so without hurting the old bloke or his rather powerful old money, landed gentry, Melbourne Club family was a delicate matter.

You see, Peter knew where all the bodies were buried and never told on anyone, so to nominate him publicly as the Vice Queen of Melbourne while he was still alive would be bad manners. He died supposedly leaving behind only a twenty million dollar fortune. Personally, I always thought Peter had more. He must have fallen on hard times.

Peter owned buildings and property and rented them out the same for the use of prostitution. He also owned brothels and gay night clubs in Hawaii. I will say more about Peter as I go along but in telling of his vice and crime interests I don’t want anyone to think that I’m being disloyal to a dear old friend. Because of his sense of comedy and eccentricity, Peter would forgive me, I’m sure. I’m told people mellow in temper and mood after their death, so I’m sure Peter would smile on this.

I first met Peter Rand when I was working as a bouncer with Cowboy Johnny Harris at Mae West’s Nightclub in Oban Street, South Yarra.

Peter was having the shit kicked out of him in the street and Johnny and I came to his rescue. This was 1970. When Mad Charlie and myself began robbing massage parlours in 1973 and 1974 Peter called us to his South Yarra mansion in Domain Road. His bodyguard at that time was an old hood named Ronnie.

Now, Ronnie worked within the prostitution industry allegedly for John Eric Twist. Jackie Twist an old-time dockie and underworld killer. So if Ronnie Banks worked for Twist, then who did Twist work for? Only Peter Rand really knew.

Ronnie was meant to give Mad Charlie and myself a fright while Peter gave us a good talking to. We had just recently made a frightful mess of the Crest massage parlour. Peter agreed that if I pleaded guilty to the Crest he would make the other eighty odd outstanding armed robberies vanish. I did and he did. He must have been a magician.

‘Sorry, my dear, but there is no other way,’ he said.

‘Kill Peter Rand,’ said Dave the Jew, ‘that’s another way.’

‘No,’ said Charlie, and I was conned into pleading guilty.

Mad Charlie and Garry the Greek, along with Mad Archie, pleaded not guilty and walked with Peter’s help. I’d been tricked. Dave the Jew was nearly as unimpressed as me and visited Peter Rand — and then I received a visit from a lawyer along with $25,000 in compo money and an urgent note to visit Peter as soon as I got out, along with a note requesting me to tell the Jew that all was well.

Dave was a severe negotiator who sometimes seemed disappointed when negotiations didn’t break down and violence had to be employed. We all know what stress these children of holocaust survivors are under. Some of them are not fussy about who they take revenge on, in the absence of Nazis. Especially Dave.

He always liked the idea of employing plan B immediately and rather than cutting to the chase he would rather chase someone to cut. I was pretty easygoing back then and, given the twenty five grand sling, agreed to bide my time.

It seemed that around that time Peter had also gained a new friend he didn’t need, Alphonse Gangitano. Peter allowed Gangitano to manage and control Rand-owned clubs, parlours and property in Richmond. West Melbourne and Carlton. Have all these years clouded my memory or did Peter have a little crush on pretty, porky Al?

Peter Rand’s vice empire was being eaten away by the rats. Peter fled to the USA — well, Waikiki in Hawaii at any rate, and sold off most of the buildings his parlours and clubs were in. Peter doubled his money on the property sales, but lost his grip on the criminal vice network he had built.

However, he has his place in Melbourne’s secret history as the man behind the introduction of homosexual brothels and bath houses into that city. It was, back then, an area no criminal would touch for fear of being tainted with the poof tag. Peter ended up making more out of gay clubs and brothels than he did out of land and property deals. He returned to Melbourne in 1976 and made it known that his interest in the vice world was no more. He was going straight, in a manner of speaking. However, Alphonse and his crew continued to stand over Peter.