Chopper Unchopped (189 page)

She was a great help in relation to all sorts of information that I desperately needed. I’d been in Pentridge for the past nine and a half years and the several hours I spent with her that afternoon proved very important. Who was up who, movements of people, who were allies and who were enemies, pillow talk to the girls about different criminal liaisons. It was the sort of information that could save your life and cost someone else theirs.

But why was she telling me all this? Was she setting me up? I kept asking myself why Anna was being so helpful, but I knew that if I didn’t ask she would end up telling me.

‘Is it true?’ asked Anna, ‘that you nearly killed Shane Goodfellow in H Division, Pentridge?’ I nodded.

Anna continued. ‘Goodfellow and his mates pack raped me a few years ago,’ said Anna, ‘I mean they nearly killed me.’

‘I see him with Alphonse all the time but what can I do? I have to smile and pretend it never happened, but it did happen, Chopper, and I don’t forget and I don’t forgive,’ said Anna.

Suddenly I realised that little Anna was a lady with a serious score to settle and a long memory.

‘Are you still polishing that dog Alphonse?’ I asked.

‘I polish a lot of guys, Chopper. It don’t mean I like ’em. You know Mad Charlie is going to set you up for Alphonse?’ she said.

‘How do you know this?’ I asked. She smiled.

‘Al likes to big note himself. You would be amazed the shit he tells me while I’m jumping up and down on his dick.’

I stopped playing pool and sat down. She sat next to me.

‘You know, I reckon you’re gonna be a good little mate to have on side, Princess,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ replied Anna.

I walked away from the Leinster Arms Hotel that day with a new friend and, no, I didn’t get into her pants. That’s one of the reasons we stuck so staunch: I was probably the only bloke who hadn’t tried to get up her since she was thirteen. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Because of her warning I was able to keep my guard up with Charlie. If she hadn’t I probably would have been led to my death by a man I considered my mate. I’m still close friends with Anna to this day and remembering that both Alphonse and Mad Charlie are dead, murders that I believe will never be solved, regardless of what the police and media may believe, I will simply leave the readers to ponder the heart-warming story of Anna Martin.

I may make mention of her as I go along, but in relation to Alphonse and Mad Charlie and even the late Shane Goodfellow, I will depart the topic by simply saying what better friend to have than a friend who is, to put it politely, sleeping with the enemy.

I will leave the Anna Martin story with her favourite quote by American Country singer Jeanie Seely: ‘I woke up on the right side of the wrong bed this morning.’

IT WAS very early in the morning of 9 January, 1999, and the phone rang. It was a reporter asking me what I knew about Vincenzo Mannella. Poor Vinnie had been gunned down in his driveway in North Fitzroy. Apart from explaining the whole structure of the Italian Australian criminal world, all I could say without getting myself involved was that Vinnie had been a smalltime crim and a big-time gambler who lost more than he won.

He had also been a mate of the late Alphonse Gangitano. None of these things were going to be good for his health, especially all at once.

My opinion isn’t evidence so the reporter didn’t repeat it and I won’t repeat it now. Given the Flannery fiasco, it is clear that my opinion is considered evidence in some quarters. What I will say is that Vinnie was a forty-eight-year-old knockabout hood who also liked to shroud himself in the Mafia myth. He was also a sort of mate with the late Mad Charlie, who got his lights put out a few months beforehand in his front yard in Caulfield. Big Al, Mad Charlie and Vincenzo Mannella all got whacked in their own homes or outside their own homes by a man lying in wait or a visitor to the home under the cover of darkness, and all three knew each other.

Naturally the police and media see no link at all. Why should they? After all, the wood is impossible to see because there are too many bloody trees in the way.

I would go as far as to say all three men had known each other for a good twenty years, had played cards together till the wee hours of many a morning, had drunk at the same clubs together all night long, for a long, long time and probably shared the same whores or whore over a stretch of years.

They were as friendly as three men could be in a world where no man really trusts the other. It is almost as if someone is working their way down a list and you’d have to know the rank structure to know who was going to be next. But then again what would I know? I’m just a middle-aged, fat, has-been chicken farmer, so I will leave it all to the great crime solvers.

I sleep safe in my bed at night knowing that such crime solvers are awake and out there on the job. Poor old Chopper Read, he is so far behind he can’t hear the band playing. But when the wind blows from the mainland and all is quiet in Tassie, you can just hear The Munster laughing, or is he coughing?

MY old H Division Pentridge enemy Keith Faure paid me a surprise visit a while ago. I was dipping sheep about a half a mile away when he called. I saw these two people, a man and a woman, driving down the mile-long dirt driveway on the property next to ours. I thought they were a pair of God botherers as we get a few bible bashing door knockers round this way. I went up to the pub to find a letter waiting for me. I’d sent Keith a Christmas card and he had come down to see me forgetting that us farmers are hard to find. His letter read as follows :

‘Dear Mark
,

Missed you, I called in as a surprise, I really am disappointed that I didn’t see your crazy face. I came with my lady for a brief tour of Tasmania. She too looked forward to meeting you. I called at your place. Your lady, a little despondent, however understandable. Will catch up with you later on perhaps. Thank you for the Xmas card, sentiments expressed are a mutual embrace of my idealism also. Take care Mark, all the best. We regret nothing as you said. Let the rats walk the hard roads of ours. See how long they last. Buona fortune.

– Keith Faure, Richmond Arms 10.1.99.’

I bet my wife was despondent. The mad buggers had asked for Mark Brandon Read at three different farms in the area. Anyone asking for me gets told nothing. Farm people don’t hand out information freely and the poor lady on the other property shit herself when they asked ‘Is Mark home?’ Within an hour the whole Richmond district knew of the visit of two strangers looking for me. Had Keithy thought to tell anyone his last name I would have stopped dipping sheep and headed for the pub for a drink as I hold no ill-will toward Keithy.

We both did what we had to do back then. Why Keithy introduced himself to people as Keith from Hobart is beyond me. When I heard Keith from Hobart was looking for me I said I only know two Keiths, my Dad and Keithy Faure and neither come from bloody Hobart. The next time you come to visit, Keithy, for Christ sake write me a bloody letter to the Richmond Post Office.

Now, where was I?

I’VE just got myself a video camera. I’m off to see Shane Farmer, the owner of the Men’s Gallery Nightclub in Hobart, to get Alison ‘Candy’ Downes on camera. I can see it now a Chopper Read Production, interview with a lap dancer.

Priests have been defrocked for waving at Candy from a distance of three hundred yards. She is a dead set weapon in the looks department but quite a normal, everyday girl when you talk to her and a personal friend. Even my wife likes her. How many wives would allow their husbands to have Miss Nude Australia as a friend? It says volumes about Alison’s personality and Mary-Ann’s sound judgement.

Alison has seen more of the world than I ever will. She has danced from London to New York. Never dismiss the adventures girls get into. Some men tell a better yarn because they talk louder, but Candy has told me a few to put my stories to shame.

DANIEL ‘Danny Boy’ Mendoza was a strange sort of fellow when I first met him in 1987.

He had only been in Australia about seven or so years and didn’t speak the best of English. He came from Romania and was introduced to me by the late Albanian crime boss Nayim ‘Norm’ Dardovski at the Builders Arms Hotel in Fitzroy.

‘Romanian Danny’ was into everything and was trying to import Russian prostitutes into Australia by arranging bogus marriages. The husband, generally a Romanian working for the Romanian crime gangs, was given about a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars per week out of the earnings of the Russian whore who could make between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars per night in a Romanian-controlled massage parlour or brothel. One hundred and eighty dollars per hour for an eight to ten-hour shift five to six nights per week.

The whore would pocket about a thousand or fifteen hundred of her own money per week that she could either save, spend or invest with her Romanian minders in the heroin and meth amphetamine industries.

One whore could average five to seven thousand dollars a week so there was enough cash in it for the Russian whore and her Romanian protectors to be interested. One parlour or brothel working six ladies on the night shift and four on the day shift, we never close, rear entrance, parking available, so the advertisement read, was pulling in fifty to seventy thousand per week.

So it wasn’t small change. These Russian girls were all big, strong, tall, well-built ladies, long legs, big tits, big hips, I mean they were very good-looking voluptuous Amazons. And they never said nyet.

They spoke several languages except English. I met a few of these ladies. They all called me Mr Chopper, thinking Chopper was my real name. Danny Boy Mendoza, that wasn’t his real name, Danny Boy or Danny was the name he was called by. He was also known as Romanian Danny. He would check in on the various Russian girls under his control.

The point was they worked for the Romanians while maintaining the facade of a marriage. The trouble was their Romanian husbands sometimes demanded a larger slice of the pie or, horror of horrors, would fall in love and demand she stop working.

The husbands created all the problems. Danny’s job was to see that the girls had no problem with their husbands. More cash could be arranged, two hundred even three to five hundred a week could be arranged, but sex between the Romanian husband and the whore Russian wife generally meant the simple Romanian silly enough to involve himself in this immigration scam was also silly enough to fall in love.

Later the Russian whore immigration scam came undone and backfired on the Romanians when the Russian wives began bringing out their own brothers, mothers, fathers, uncles and so on.

Suddenly the fucking Romanians found their Russian whores waving goodbye and the Romanians unable to move against the Russian relatives most of whom were Russian criminals. It was a real mess. You wouldn’t know whether to give it to the NCA or the UN. By the way, what is Romanian for blow job?

Danny Boy mixed in this world. Drug dealing, arms dealing, prostitution, immigration fraud, social security fraud, extortion, blackmail. He was murdered in June, 1998, and no wonder.

It was rumoured to be on the orders of a Romanian crime boss nicknamed The Gypsy or the Young One. I won’t mention his name. I knew him in Pentridge Prison in the late 1980s. He was doing four years for social security fraud.

He was a very quiet and polite gentleman with the smile of a vampire and the look of a friendly undertaker. He knew old Norm the Albanian and we became friends as a result. So I wasn’t bothered with his real name. Romanian names are so hard to remember anyway and my memory is fading.

Anyway, back to the story. Danny once took me to a brothel in Footscray he claimed he owned. Back then his name on introduction was Magdalin Dimitrou. I called him My Darlin’ Danny Boy.

‘Magdalin sounded like ‘my darlin’. He didn’t like that but, oh well. He chatted about being in the Romanian Army and coming to Australia as a refugee and the Russian girls under his control or in his charge. He was eager to impress old Norm via my good self. Danny owed old Norm money — five thousand dollars. Now, there have been many people in the crime world who had inflated reputations as tough guys, but let me say that Norm was a man who was always given respect. He was a real hard man who didn’t need headlines and hangers-on to create some gangster image.

I thought to myself then if Danny was such a Romanian big shot how come he couldn’t repay the loan?

It turned out Danny may have handled the girls but other Romanians handled the cash. Danny was only a bit player in a much larger production. We got to the brothel and Danny and I went inside. He introduced me to a Russian beauty queen nearly as tall as myself and a body that could hardly be contained under the satin dressing gown she was nearly wearing. The plan was for this Russian vacuum cleaner to suck my brains out and as a result I would become Danny’s best friend.

It seemed like a good plan to me. I couldn’t fault it, really.

The Russian girl spoke almost no English except for ‘You like?’

Was that a trick question?

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I like.’

‘You have wife?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘no wife.’

She understood the no wife bit and went at it like a mad woman. I had my pants down around my ankles with my roll of money in my left hand and my gun in my right hand. She was on her knees with both hands grabbing my tattooed bum and her mouth around the rest of me coming up for air long enough to ask some stupid broken English question.

She clearly didn’t know that in refined company it was rude to speak with one’s mouth full.

‘You Danny’s friend?’

‘Yes, I’m Danny’s friend.’

‘You no pay money, I do coz I like you,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ I thought, ‘I’ve heard that before’.

‘I see you again?’

‘Yeah, you see me again.’

‘My name Yousna, your name Choppa?’

‘Yeah, my name Chopper’.

OK, so it wasn’t riveting dialogue, but we were both kinda busy.

‘You have phone number?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I give you mine,’ she said. God knows where she intended to write it.

‘Yeah, okay,’ I said.

Then back to work she went. She was no slacker, that’s for sure.

Later we went back to the lounge room waiting area and Yousna gave Danny a big kiss on the mouth.

Yousna then turned to me and put out her hand and I shook it solemnly as though we were business colleagues.

‘I see you Choppa, you nice man, you ring me?’

And with that she gave me her phone number.

‘You want see me, you ring.’ It was more an order than a question.

‘Yeah, I’ll ring,’ I said and with a wave I walked out. Danny, wanting to big note himself grabbed Yousna on the arse and put his face between her big tits and proceeded to blow imaginary bubbles. He was such a card.

She giggled and that was that. Two hours later, as a favour to old Norm I’ve got a gun in Danny’s mouth telling him he had till tomorrow to repay the five grand. Blowing bubbles indeed.

That night in the bar of the Builders Arms Hotel in Fitzroy, Yousna walks in looking for me. I didn’t flatter myself that she was in love. Not when old Norm recognised her as Danny Boy’s live-in girlfriend. I took Yousna to meet Mad Charlie and she entertained Mad Charlie, myself and assorted other members of Charlie’s crew. Charlie was talking to her in wog talk. I couldn’t understand a word. The next thing I know is she is in tears and Charlie is taking me into the hallway for a private talk.

‘What’s going on?’ asks Charlie.

I acted dumb.

‘What’s going on with you and her boyfriend?’

‘He owes old Norm five grand.’

‘I told you to stay away from them fucking Albanians,’ screams Mad Charlie.

‘Who are you talking to, you bald-headed dwarf?’ I yelled back.

‘Jesus, Charlie.’ I continued, ‘You can’t help yourself. You spend half an hour up her arse and now you wanna give me the arse.’

‘Fuck Norm,’ said Charlie, ‘let the old dog collect his own money.’

‘There’s the telephone, Charlie,’ I said. ‘Ring Norm up and tell him your fuckin’ self.’

Mad Charlie may have been mad but he wasn’t crazy. Norm was not a man to phone with obscenities. He turned and just walked away.

Yousna had found a new friend and through Yousna Mad Charlie started doing business with Danny and the Romanians and Norm got his five grand back. I saw Yousna about a month later with Mad Charlie and Danny. She saw me and ignored me, a real nose in the air job.