Chopper Unchopped (191 page)

IT IS the 8th of April. My wife Mary-Ann’s birthday. Yesterday I went to Hobart to buy her a birthday gift but I ended up at Shane Farmer’s and Alison Downes’ nightclub, The Men’s Gallery in Hobart. Now, I thought they might have some nice bath crystals or a box of Quality Street chocolates there but I was hijacked by firewater and naughty girlies.

Evidently I got rotten drunk and was putting my head between the dancer’s legs and giving them shoulder rides round the club against their will, I’m told.

I thought it was the height of good humour, but I may have been wrong. I was being rude to American sailors, singing a song called
Cotton Fields
to a group of black gentleman and generally making an arsehole of myself.

You must remember I was in prison when political correctness crept up on the outside world, which makes me a member of some sort of deprived minority, when you think about it.

The bouncer asked me to tone it down. I told him to come back when he had learnt how to fight. He left without further comment. I thought he may cry. Funny, that. One lady ended up in tears after proudly showing me her brand new boob enlargement job. Most impressive. I advised her to go back and get her face fixed as a job lot. Ha, ha. Who said stand-up is dead?

I ran up a bar bill of several hundred dollars. I was only drinking scotch and cokes but at eight to nine per hour for six hours plus food I suspect someone had been playing with the book keeping. My wife was called and she came in and took me home — and, you guessed it, I forgot her birthday gift. Mary-Ann told me I’m an alcoholic. With that sort of rap I could have been Prime Minister.

I said: ‘I don’t hit you and your purse is always full so what’s the problem?’ Then she said she doesn’t want little Charlie to be brought up by a drunk.

Bingo, that hit home. Oh, I forgot to mention that, at the time of writing, Mary-Ann is going to have a baby. I told her that we will have to go to the doctor and find out what caused it then we must stop doing it right away.

It is going to be a boy from the scan and I’m naming him Charles Vincent Read. Charles after Mad Charlie because the baby was conceived on or around the time Mad Charlie got put off and Vincent after old Vincent Villeroy and my father-in-law, Ernest Vincent Hodge.

I do enjoy a social drink and if I am an alcoholic I’m a bloody friendly happy one, but I may have to tone down my drinking as Mary-Ann’s remark hurt. The remarks of wives are meant to hurt and they seem to know what to say and the right or wrong time to say it as well.

IT IS 5.30 in the morning as I write this. I must let my chooks out and feed them and start my general duties on the farm. Paul Manning and me cut several tons of wood the other day and I think we have some other nice jobs lined up for today. It’s either dipping sheep, drenching sheep, crutching sheep or shearing fucking sheep or bloody ploughing up the paddocks with the tractor. And to think I spent years fighting to get out of jail, to do this.

It’s all good fun. Carting hay is a great job. Eight or nine hours flat out in the sun tossing bales of hay onto the back of a trailer then unloading it and stacking it. Isn’t it any wonder that I sometimes take a cool drink on a warm day and on occasions flee from the midday sun to head for the Men’s Gallery.

Slip, slop, slap has been my motto. Slip on your shoes, slop some Irish whiskey into ya, and slap some lap dancer on the arse. No chance of skin cancer there.

The film people rang again. They live in another world, them sort of people. The Chinese built the bloody Great Wall in about the same time as this thing has been going on.

Anyway, back to the main event. At the time of writing the American war ship the USS
Carl Vinson
is in Hobart and half the knob polishers in Australia are here for the visit.

So far half the American sailors I’ve bumped into are as camp as a row of tents so a lot of girls are in for a shock unless they brought their brothers with them and in Tassie they just could have.

I understand the world less and less. Sometimes it looks clearer through the bottom of a glass. Here we supposedly have one of the finest military forces in the world and I suspect they would be better off being armed with handbags.

When I was in school in the first grade the teacher told me one and one was two. ‘Now, wait a minute,’ I said ‘how do you know?’ And right then we had our first big problem.

In reality how do any of us know anything for sure? Just because it’s meant to be so, don’t make it so. So when I write about Flannery, Alphonse, Mendoza, Mad Charlie, Vinnie Mannella, Ray Chuck, remember that. Just because what was meant to be, doesn’t make it so. I knew these people through the years, some of them nearly all my life.

The myths, rumours, legends and stories relating to their lives and their deaths are in a large part created by people who didn’t know them at all. The journos and the coppers who spoke of them and wrote about them with such knowledge wouldn’t actually recognise them face to face, unless they served them a cafe latte in a sushi bar.

So, just remember that while the men who pooh-pooh my version of events and opinions tell you I’m wrong and laugh at me and continue to weave these myths for you, remember that I knew these blokes, no matter how many so-called keep telling you I’m wrong.

They never knew any of these blokes at all. I’ve got the scars to prove my CV. The only scars some journos have is from grabbing their glass of hot coffee without using a napkin. The most dash most of them show is not tipping a slow waiter.

Back to Mad Charlie. The last time I spoke to Charlie was on the telephone about a week before he died. It was November the 17th, 1998, my birthday. I pondered how he got hold of my unlisted phone number but I had learned many years earlier never to wonder too long how Charlie got his info.

Our last conversation was light. ‘How’s it going, Chop?’

‘What do you want, wog?’

‘Happy birthday, mate.’

‘Who gave you my phone number? Longley?’
(editor’s note: Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley, the former painter and docker, gunman and ballroom dancer.)

‘Nah,’ said Charlie, ‘Fuck Longley. Anyway, do you still talk to that old maggot?’

‘Nah,’ I said, ‘I fell out with him over that shit with Jasmine and Maltese Dave.’ This refers to a private matter that don’t concern the readers who are not painters and dockers.

‘You heard from Neville lately. Chop?’ By this he meant Norm the Albanian’s son.

‘No, Charlie. But I’ve got his brother Richard’s phone number,’ I said.

‘I need to talk to him,’ said Charlie.

‘How’s the Greek going, mate?’ I asked politely. Meaning Nick the Greek Apostolidis.

‘I don’t see him no more,’ said Charlie, which I knew was a lie.

‘What’s wrong mate, you don’t sound too good? Are you still on the gear?’ Meaning heroin.

‘Who told you that?’ said Charlie.

‘The Jew,’ I replied. ‘Ah, fuck that mad c….,’ said Charlie. ‘Keep him away from me.’

‘So what’s the problem, Charlie? Do you miss me now that Alphonse is gone? Ha ha.’

‘Fuck Alphonse,’ replied Charlie. ‘Fuck em all. How come we fell out, Chop?’

‘I don’t know Charlie, you tell me.’

‘Yeah well,’ replied Charlie, ‘fault on both sides.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘yours and yours. You took that dago’s side against me and now you’re all a fucking lone. Do you miss me a bit, Charlie?’

‘Don’t rub it in, no ears,’ said Charlie.

‘Are you still seeing Jandie?’ I asked.

‘Nah, who was that other one?’ said Charlie, rattling off a list of girls’ names.

‘Suzie,’ I said.

‘Anna,’ replied Charlie. ‘Yeah, now and again. You married now?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ said Charlie.

‘You a father I hear, Charlie?’

‘Yeah, two kids. When are you coming back to Melbourne, mate?’ asked Charlie.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘We should see each other,’ said Charlie.

‘Yeah, okay Charlie,’ I said.

‘What’s wrong, Charlie? I asked again

‘Ahh, you know,’ said Charlie. ‘More of the same old shit, only twice as much. I’ll be right, I’ve fucked ’em before, I’ll fuck ’em again.’

More conversation re phone numbers and personal details, then Charlie hung up. I knew he was in serious trouble, I just didn’t know if he realised how deep.

The truth was Charlie had lost his army. When the barman calls last drinks, you leave. Charlie refused to leave. I looked up an old phone number and rang Anna Martin.

She was now in her thirties and still looked in her twenties, I’m told.

She always thanked me for fixing her problem with Shane Goodfellow, somehow thinking I had a hand in his death, which I did not.

And because I predicted the death of Alphonse she, like a lot of others, thought I had a role to play in that as well. Which I did not.

Anna had been screwing Alphonse almost up to the moment he died. She was now working part-time in a brothel in Collingwood. I rang her and asked her about Charlie. Sure enough, she was still seeing Charlie. Only he had been a bit sad the last few weeks, she said.

‘Anna, Anna, Anna, what the fuck am I gonna do?’ Charlie would moan.

‘Do about what Charlie?’ Anna would ask. ‘Ahh you know,’ Charlie would reply, but Anna didn’t know.

Anna was a Blow Queen and Charlie loved her doing the business. When Charlie was full of meth amphetamine speed this could last three to four hours at $250 to $300 per hour.

Charlie would sling Anna a flat grand whenever he called in, but lately he couldn’t even get his dick stiff. Something was on his mind. He would sit in an armchair with his handgun resting beside him watching porno videos on TV with the sound turned down so he could listen to the late-night street noises, passing cars, footsteps and so on, relaxed, at ease, tired, yet paranoid and worried.

Anna would be on her knees between his legs desperately trying to blow life into something that didn’t seem to be interested.

‘What’s wrong with him, Anna?’ I asked.

‘I know he misses you Chop. He seems very lonely of late. I feel a bit sorry for him,’ said Anna.

‘I know a lot of the friends he did have he hasn’t got no more.’

Anna and I chatted in general about life and this and that and the other and that was that. I even rang Dave the Jew about Charlie. All Dave could say is that Charlie was pretty much alone these days.

The new guys he mixed with weren’t like the old crew. They would drink with him but not die with him.

He’s all alone and feeling a bit sorry for himself. I felt a bit sad for Charlie myself after hearing all of that, but what could I do? Go back to Melbourne and hold his hand.

If I had done that I knew we would both die. I would bring trouble to him, not protect him from it. I’d held Charlie’s hand for many years — for far too many years, some might say — and now it was up to Charlie to face his own demons all on his own. He was a General without an army. I felt sorry for Charlie, but Charlie always forgot that it was other people who put him where he was and when those certain few people walked away from him he was finished. What happened had to happen. I’m surprised it took so long.

From this distance it was like watching something happen on slow motion.

Oh, well.

A PAIR of long legs can walk through doors otherwise closed. A set of big tits and a pair of big eyes and an even bigger smile can float through the valley of the shadow of death like a butterfly. My long-legged blonde mate Alison Downes has won more Miss Nude and Miss Erotica contests than I’ve had Christmas Dinners — and, please, no stuffing jokes here.

She has danced all over the world from New York, Las Vegas to London but would put the clubs in Melbourne up against the world’s best with the exception of the clubs in Hawaii. When one sits and talks to a lap dancer who has worked the international dance circuit and done clubs, bars and private functions in New York and London and hear stories about Italian stag parties in New York you learn that there is a different world out there.

She doesn’t brag, she just talks about things like when she was in a posh London hotel — the Savoy, it was — for a turn put on for Arabs, who tossed fifty pound notes on the floor until the carpet could no longer be seen while two strippers covered in baby oil rolled around the floor because whatever stuck to their skin they could keep.

Let’s say if her chest got covered with fifty pound notes she could pay off the national debt. One has to believe stories about parties in Melbourne put on by police and other parties put on by criminals when the lady telling the stories has danced on board visiting American warships and has walked, giggling, through doors marked High Security to put on strip shows for inmates in American Federal Prisons.

Then why should I disbelieve her when she tells me about a dancer she knew who danced for this group of people at this or that party or her own adventures dancing for various parties in Melbourne? So, without naming names, I will toss in a believe-it-or-not story about a bucks night in Melbourne about six months before Big Alphonse Gangitano got shot in 1997.

The party was held in the private area of a King Street club. A party attended by at least sixty to eighty top Melbourne criminals, including Alphonse and Mad Charlie. Off-duty police manned the door as security, which appealed to Big Al’s sense of comedy.

A Lebanese criminal was getting married and a long blonde stripper was booked to put on the show. As she was getting changed and preparing to do the show she heard three gun shots, then one of the off-duty policemen came into the dressing room with two Italians and she was paid a thousand dollars and told the party was cancelled.

As she was being led out of the club she saw the Lebanese guest of honour lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Mad Charlie had a gun in his hand, so did Big Alphonse. She was bundled into a car and driven back to her motel room and told to lose her memory or she would lose her head.

She lost her memory at once and rather I not mention her name in this story. I listened to her yarn and she mentioned the names of a good dozen or so other men in attendance and I couldn’t fault her or pick her up on any shaky detail nor could I see why she would want to lie about such a thing.

Then I said I’d use the story in my ninth book and she asked me again not to mention her name for some reason. I believe her story to be true, believe it or not. I don’t give a shit. I mentioned Alison Downes’ name before but that doesn’t mean that she was the dancer involved. However, I digress. Back to some more Mad Charlie stories.

OF all the criminals I could write about Charlie would be among the funniest, if not the funniest. People who try so hard to act in a serious manner tend to be quite comical.

I remember when Mad Charlie was a fifteen-year-old. He walked into the headquarters of the Victorian Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union and asked the Big Boss, Doug Sproule, for a job. Sproule told Charlie to piss off. Now, in those days, the dockies ran Melbourne and Doug was a man not to be trifled with, so how did Charlie take his job application being rejected?

Mad Charlie yelled, ‘Piss off yourself you fat dog.’ Doug Sproule came charging at young Charlie in rage. ‘Who are you calling a dog you wog bastard?’ he yelled.

Charlie spun around and aimed a .38 calibre handgun into Sproule’s face. ‘Back up, fat boy,’ snarled Charlie. ‘One day all you maggots will be working for me.’

It was an insane, comically true story about the fifteen-year-old kid who pulled the gun on Sproule after being knocked back for a job on the docks. A story told mostly by dockies to explain what a comical mental case Mad Charlie really was.

The funny part was when drugs took total control of the Melbourne criminal world some ten years later a great many painters and dockers did end up working for Mad Charlie, but Charlie was as cunning as he was mad. He was as mad as a rat and as cunning as a snake, or something like that.

Like the time he arranged for a crew to attack Brian, Les and Ray Kane outside a Melbourne nightclub so that Charlie could jump in and fight on the Kane brothers’ side, thus appearing to save the day. All because he wanted to meet the Kane brothers. Couldn’t he just drop them a note?

But that was Mad Charlie. He would do you a good turn to help you out of bad trouble and you would never know that it was Charlie who started all your trouble in the first place.

He would create the problem, then step in and solve it, receiving thanks and cash for doing so. Nice work if you could get it. Then when people started to view Charlie as the sly cunning thinker that he really was he would pull a stunt to show one and all that he was a total nut job, just to keep them guessing.

Like the time he came to visit me in Bendigo prison with Nick the Greek Apostolidis in 1986. I was the one who introduced Apostolidis to Charlie in 1975. Why, I’ll never know, but Charlie had used Apostolidis as a driver and general handy man ever since.

We were in the prison’s contact visit area and something was said to Apostolidis by a friend of Graeme Jensen’s. Graeme Jensen was also having a visit. Mad Charlie flew into a rage and wanted to fight Jensen in the visit yard then and there.

This was insane. Jensen shit himself. What mad man visits someone in prison then invites an inmate to partake in a fist fight in the bloody visit yard? Jensen couldn’t believe it. He had to maintain face and pride while knowing that he had no chance of beating Mad Charlie having seen Charlie pull his coat back to reveal the butt of a small revolver tucked into his pants. Charlie had brought a handgun into a prison visit which tells you what sort of desperate we were dealing with. Metal detectors were not used to scan visitors in 1986 at Bendigo Prison.

You don’t have to be told. The whole thing was a staged event. I broke the would-be fight up, saving the day …  and stories of Charlie’s madness were spread far and wide.

Charlie came to visit me with every intention of having a go at Jensen, a well-planned calculated act of cunning madness. We can’t ask Graeme what he thought about the whole charade, of course, because he’s the same Graeme Jensen who lost the plot and half his head when he was shot dead by police at Narre Warren when he was illegally and feloniously in possession of a spark-plug for his motor-mower. Ha, ha.

ALPHONSE Gangitano would plan his acts of violence with the same cunning. Everything was controlled and planned to make Big Al look good. Mindless insanity such as I had become famous for had to be re-enacted without the risk of prison.

It was the stuff legends are made of. But, as a bloke who had been there and done it for real, it was easy for me to spot the staged events carried out by very sane men desperately trying to act crazy in a criminal world controlled by violent insanity.

It was at a time when the crazier you were the more dangerous you were and the more respect they had to give you. So crims pretended to be mad.

I didn’t need to, back then.

The man in the grey suit brawl at the Sports Bar in King Street, Melbourne was a staged event, as fake as a three dollar bill. Gangitano, wearing a grey suit, and named in court and police statements as the man in the grey suit, cut loose in the Sports Bar with billiard cues and turned the club into a bloodbath. Big Al went to the club to collect money from the management then wrecked the place when the money was not forthcoming. It was all a staged event, put on to impress other club owners and criminals as well as onlooking prostitutes that Big Al was bigger and badder than ever in spite of the fact that he was touching middle age, touching the coke, and touching his own dick as well.

Prostitutes being the biggest gossips within the criminal structure, that two bob nightclub brawl earned him more brownie points then the shooting of Greg Workman.

Its easy to separate the real psychos from the false pretenders. Art imitates life and within the criminal world life can also imitate art. It is a stage full of actors. The separation of fact from fiction is almost impossible. False pretenders and role players walk hand in hand with true blue psychopaths.

The difference is that the real psychopath lives in a world all of his own, deep in his own mind. The psycho may very well enjoy the company of actors and role players providing that the psychopath can join in on a drama created by the play actors in a theatre funded by drug dollars.

The psychopath only wants to take part for his own comic reasons no matter if the game is true or false, created by real men or dream merchants. It is of no importance to the psychopath. He doesn’t need to rehearse his lines in the play because he is not acting.

He doesn’t care if the Alphonse Gangitanos and Mad Charlies of the criminal world are play acting at their own fantasy or serious hard men. All the psychopath wants is to be provided with a stage, a battle field. Both Mad Charlie and Aphonse had psychopaths on their side but they both forgot that when the curtain comes down and the fat lady has sung her last song the psychopath will turn on the director and step over his body toward the next game and the next stage.

There you are, I’ve just told you who killed both men and why. Providing you know the name of each man’s psychopath you can solve the riddle. Ha, ha.

But you’d already know the answer to that, wouldn’t you? The police and media think they do, them being so smart and me being so stupid. Ha, ha. ‘Ahh Magoo, you’ve done it again.’

ATTILLA the Hen and Gloria Simpson have just had a massive fight in the barn yard. Attilla the Hen is really a rooster and much bigger than Gloria Simpson, but Gloria beat him.

Meanwhile, in all the excitement, Pauly the Parrot nearly bit the top of my left thumb off.

There are a family of possums living in the roof of our house and they come in through the kitchen window to raid the bread and jam.

Billy our dwarf Jack Russell barks his head off and the cats go mad but possums can outfight pound for pound any cat or dog. They can be quite vicious.

I’ve seen bull terriers and American Pit Bulls who have fought and killed a possum and it has always involved a large vet’s bill for the owner of the dog.

The claws and teeth on a possum can rip the neck and guts out of a dog even while it is being savaged to death.

The possum will slash and rip and bite its final goodbye. Anyone who feels different has never sicked their dog on to a possum at night. Makes you wonder how the greyhound trainers give their dogs a ‘kill’ to get them keen. Once upon a time they would always pay you to trap them a possum or three for the dishlickers to get a taste of blood so the dimwitted bloody things would chase the lure. But I guess they used to muzzle the possums and blunt their claws first. Not what I call good sportsmanship. I’m sure it doesn’t happen anymore, what with the RSPCA and everything. Even Tasmanian Devils who will attack and kill possums don’t do so without injury. The possum is a much underestimated fighter and when I see one in my kitchen raiding the bread bin it looks at me as if to say ‘Go on, have a go’ and then moves on quietly.

I think to myself that I should look after my weight and the possums are doing me a favour in knocking off some of the jam. Plus I’ve already got enough scars from knives, baseball bats and bullets without being savaged by furry little cuddly animals.

They say the underworld is tough, but half the time out here in the great Australian bush I want to sleep under the bed with the doona over my head.

Watchchook sleeps at night. If Watchchook was awake he’d have ’em. Who is Watchchook, you ask? My secret weapon.

Watchchook is a specially trained attack fowl fed on mince meat and is the dead set, biggest, meanest most blood crazy chook God ever shovelled guts into.

Watchchook sleeps in a tree separate from the rest and will dive down on passersby. I tossed Watchchook up into a pine tree when he was a chicken and fed him on mince meat, not grain like the other pansies.

It has sent Watchchook a bit silly. His tree is near the front gate and Watchchook is territorial and will swoop down screaming.

If you have ever been attacked from above and behind by a giant chook then you’ll know it can put you off your breakfast. You don’t need a high fibre diet to get the guts going when Watchchook tries to bungy jump onto your head.

When Watchchook attacks the rest of the barn yard starts screaming, which means I can’t be tip-toed up on during the day. I have another animal I let out at after dark to warn me of any night intruders but that, as they say in the classics, is another story. Ha ha. Just as dangerous as Dave the Jew and less expensive to feed. Doesn’t need any medication.

IT was 1974 and the parlour war, as the newspapers called it, was well and truly under way. Mad Charlie led the gang, and me, Mad Archie and Garry the Greek ran riot. We were having a great time. Prostitution was illegal, meaning massage parlours and brothels were operating against the law and the people who ran them, for the most part, were criminals who couldn’t holler for the law.