Chopper Unchopped (199 page)

I would have liked to give him the benefit of the doubt but Mick was convicted of rape — twice. Once could be a mistake, but twice is stretching it. To me it is most embarrassing to know that a former friend could sink so low. He had the money to pay for whores. Why bash and rape women? I simply cannot understand it.

He had a beautiful defacto and a couple of girlfriends on the side and he goes out and rapes some innocent country girl and beats her half to death.

I can’t explain it. I have sat and watched men die, get shot or jailed. If you sit long enough by a river you will see all your enemies float past — face down.

I’m not saying everyone I know is a good bloke. I know some nice dead set dogs. That’s fine. I know they are dogs and so do they. No-one is pretending to be what they are not besides a good dog is worth his weight in gold, providing he isn’t chewing on your leg and owns a few nightclubs. In Melbourne, not Hobart, I hasten to add. I cast no aspersions at nightclub people in Tasmania who may slip me the odd drinkcard.

But I digress. I guess I’m trying to say goodbye Micky. You were one of the best mate. Past tense. Via con Dios, amigo.

FEW criminals ever walk out of the shadow of darkness and on into the light of normality. Most remain where they are or rise to a certain level then fall back. Few ever climb out of the sewer pit. I’ve walked through the shadow of the valley of death and I’ve no time or patience or pity for former colleagues who point blank refuse to march forward.

If this is a hard and unsympathetic attitude so be it but I’m not running some public charity operating a life line for losers. As I’ve said before, Je Ne Regrette Rien, I regret nothing.

It’s high time a few of the so-called hard boys remembered this and stopped crying on every bastard’s shoulder. As Billy Joe fell to the floor the crowd all gathered round and wondered at his final words. ‘Don’t take your guns to town son, leave your guns at home Bill, don’t take your guns to town.’

You can laugh and you can cry, you can bleed until you die but one way or the other, son, your gonna pay your bill.

Post script: Micky Marlow might possibly be the longest serving recipient of unemployment benefits in Australian history. In fact, no-one I know can remember a time when Mad Micky was not collecting the dole. I think he went straight from kindergarten to the dole office. Do not pass go, do collect $100. I could be wrong. However Micky Marlow does recall to mind the old poem by A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson:

‘Oh it’s dreadful to think in a country like this with its chances for work and enjoyment,

That a man like McGuinness was certain to miss whenever he tried for employment.’

And now, some Henry Lawson to go with it:

‘And them that thinks they are better than the rest of all mankind while the sun never sets on the empire in their mind.’

Lawson wrote that about the Australian landed gentry squatter class. He also noted that when the man from the city robs you he will do it with a gun at your head or a blade at your throat and have the manners to wear a mask, whereas the man from the bush will do it with a firm handshake and a warm smile.

I’VE always meant to include at least one recipe, ingredients and directions for the making of a particular Chopper dish in each book but never got around to it.

There are some really good ways of serving cheap cuts of stewing meat, lamb or beef. It don’t matter. I call it Chopper’s Hot Pot. First you need a large pot, I mean a pot big enough to sit in, get the picture? A big pot.

Now, chop up six garlic cloves and four onions.

Have a stubbie.

This is to feed four people — with leftovers for the dog, if you want your dog to smell like a gamey Italian waiter. If someone turns up uninvited at tea time they can sit and watch the dog eat his. Ha ha ha.

Chop up some peppers, capsicums, tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes — in fact any vegie that comes to hand.

Have a stubbie.

If it moves, kill it and cut it up. If it grows, pull it out and chop it up. This is the general thinking. Put a great whack of butter in the pot and turn up the heat. Toss your garlic and onions in with a table spoon of Keens Curry Powder.

Have a stubbie.

Let that fry away lightly for a while then toss in all your vegies, then rip open a can — a large can of Heinz Beef Broth barley and vegies. and toss that in. Add water.

Have a stubbie.

Add Kikhoman Soy Sauce and a hearty whack of old El Paso Thick ‘n’ Chunky Salsa.

Have a piss (not in the pot) to make space to add another stubbie, to taste.

More heat, then you add you sliced meat, lamb or beef all chopped up in to bite size bits. One spoon of cornflour, chopped up. Mushrooms can be added, and a spoon of hot mustard. Personally. I like to add chopped liver and kidney to this. Animal ones if you can get them. Then, when you have it on the boil, add your macaroni or pasta for the posh among you reading this, and that’s Chopper’s Hot Pot.

Now you got to give this a bit of time to stew and sort of cook away. For the herb lovers a hand full of mixed herbs can be tossed out the window, but nowhere near my Hot Pot.

If it doesn’t look thick enough add more vegies, chopped celery, and spring onions, but I’m betting it will come up a treat. I like to add a dash of milk to my hot pot.

Once ready it is served with ice cold beer. Always leave cans of beer in freezer for three minutes before serving. Bon Appetito.

I CAME home drunk and bit the dog on the ear. My wife told me if I ever bit Little Bill again she would axe me to death in my sleep. I think she is serious. I was just talking to the dog in a language he would understand. Needless to say a domestic had erupted. I have a hot pot on the stove, and am being told that if I bite the dog again I’m a dead man. Am I to take any of this seriously? While cooking the hot pot and having a beer to wash down the taste of dog’s ear out of my mouth I let my mind wander.

I’ve always got two sets of phone numbers to ring in case I visit Melbourne or Sydney and both sets of numbers will deliver and suck it till its unblocked and even bring a dozen cans and a pizza with ’em.

One set are female media types and the other charge $200 per hour. Frank Sinatra was right. You can call him all the names you like but he was right, believe me.

HIS name was Terry Flannery. He was a deadset junkie crim, a nitwit, tough guy dwarf. His only saving grace was his girlfriend, Helga. Helga was the classic big blonde prostitute. She was the sort of chick everyone had screwed but no-one admitted to it.

Helga could screw a bloke for a year and not know his last name and not even bother asking. She was a big picture girl who didn’t let her mind get cluttered with detail.

She kept every boyfriend she ever had alive and fully funded. She was a workhorse and would work seven nights a week in parlours in and around inner city Melbourne. Flexi-legs, but no flexi-time.

She would work full of speed methamphetamine and relax on heroin, then she worked on heroin and relaxed on speed.

Hey, Helga, do us a favour will you? She would get into your car and blow you and your mates for free as long as it built credit. The chick’s life ran on credit. She needed men to owe her a favour and a lot of those favours got repaid. She could run up drug bills worth thousands and pay them off with her arse.

The dealer and his mates owned her. She was owned by dozens of dealers, but the biggest was Mister Death, Dennis Bruce Allen. The stories of Helga sucking guys off in Allen’s house in Cubitt Street, Richmond, while Dennis shot them in the head are famous.

They got a head job, all right, but not the one they planned. Dennis would get Helga to signal him, he’d watch the guy’s face and eyes and Helga would wave a hand as the bloke blew and as she swallowed Dennis would pull the trigger. Dennis would masturbate as he watched, with his gun in the other hand, then fire the fatal shots. Then Helga would crawl over and polish Dennis off with a head job.

She would get a few grams of heroin for this and a shower before being kicked out of 49 Cubitt Street. Dennis was a sick bastard.

He would get desperate junkies to perform sex acts with dogs as a way of repaying debts. He had fourteen year old prostitutes and their thirty-two year old mothers put on lesbian acts or get sisters to screw brothers.

Heroin was the master, Dennis was the ring master and all else simply part of his circus. They reckon it was Helga Wagnegg who was actually screwing Victor Gouroff on the lounge suite when Dennis axed him to death. Now that’s a real chop-up.

The truth of this I don’t know, but Helga was a bitch on heat. She loved drugs and she loved sex and admitted that she was a slut with no place left to go but down and few if any had been down as low as Helga.

She would put on sex parties and have sex with policemen friendly to Dennis. And for those who think they may have got away with it because both Dennis and Helga are no longer with us, I have bad news. Polaroid photos would be taken and they are still about. Dennis would laugh out loud at the Cherry Tree Hotel, and no wonder.

Helga had her nice side now and again. When no-one was looking she would give you a smile if she liked you, just a warm friendly little girl smile. It was just a moment of recognition from one human to another.

I got a few of Helga’s smiles and I smiled and nodded back then she would return to the living valley of death she called life.

Helga was once a top looking lady, all tits and legs. She could have been a movie star or at least a porno queen. She wasn’t ugly, she just became ugly and she knew that the men she loved so much would one day be the death of her.

She seemed to love the company of men she knew would bash her near to death or kill her if she did not obey them or if she crossed them. In the end she got her wish.

It was felt Helga had turned dog and was going to give evidence against Dennis and other members of the crew and that was her death warrant.

She was killed and dumped in the Yarra. Even had she lived to give evidence, who could a junkie hooker hurt in court?

She was basically killed because she ended up disgusting even men like Allen. She was a living reminder of what scum they had all become and she had to go. She had to be blotted from their minds.

However, as one man who had smiled at Helga and caused her to smile back, I can only recall the little girl’s face and for a moment the innocence within all evil shone out at me and hit me like sunshine.

Dennis Allen was maybe one of the most evil monsters in Melbourne criminal history. I nearly killed the bloke in 1975 in B Division, Pentridge, and I deeply regret my moment of Christian kindness. If I had killed him, I wonder how many people would be alive today? Would Helga? Probably not, she was always committing suicide in instalments with the needle as her preferred weapon.

But as I flutter through the pages of my memory I can recall Dennis as a happy, fun-loving, cheeky young scallywag who would rather do you a good turn then a bad one and I wonder at the monster that took Dennis by the hand and walked him into the valley. Dennis did not wish to be the best of the best, he wanted to be the master of all evil and madness and he almost got there. He wasn’t the worst but my oath he came close. The only thing he didn’t do was eat human flesh and I’ve got no evidence that he never did that either.

Wayne Stanhope, Greg Pasche, Vic Gouroff, Anton Kenny and ‘The Hairdresser’. I don’t know his name, but he got shot for giving Dennis a bad haircut.

I pity none of them. Call me soft hearted but I sort of feel a bit sorry for Helga. She may have had a sick and evil heart but she also had a big heart and for a kind word and a smile she would walk over broken glass for you. A kind word and a pat on the head … she was like an animal in that regard.

That’s all she ever really wanted, but in the end she got a bucket of water poured down her neck and a heroin needle up her arm, gang banged in the arse and tossed in the Yarra. The valley of the shadow of death, few if any walk through it. Poor Helga, here’s a smile for you, Princess. Rest in peace. Whatever you deserved, you didn’t deserve that.

Am I getting sentimental and soft hearted in my old age?

I LOOK back on the past and friends and foes alike with a fond sentiment and sadness as we all walked through that same valley. Even old coppers like Rocket Rod Porter, Dirty Larry Curnow, Barry the Boy Hahnel, Garry Schipper, the late John Hill but to name a small, small few.

All coppers who had a hand in creation of the myth that became the monster. Whether they knew it or not my friends and my enemies have all helped to create the myth of Chopper Read, a myth based on reality but a reality that was so insane it was in fact partly fiction. Am I making sense?

If one examines the life of Dennis Bruce Allen one can only wonder if it all really happened. I know Peter Allen quite well and of all that clan Peter was the thinker — as cold bloodied as all the rest put together but a thinker. Yet, for all his mad insanity he never lost his soul. He never lost the ability to laugh at his own life.

In other words, he never took himself too seriously. I think therein lays the secret key to walking through the shadow of the valley and coming out alive.

A sense of comedy, the ability to laugh at yourself and your own situation and when you come out the other end you look back and wonder what it was all about. The crims and the coppers wade through the sewer of blood, guts and drugs can only come out the other side half sane if they keep a sense of humour. If they ever acknowledge that it is all real and not some cops and robbers game they would go mad.

The friends and enemies alike you began with are for the most part all dead and you’re surrounded by a new world you don’t understand. Full of new people who don’t understand you.

But I sit in my chook shed and look out across the farm and I notice that the land hasn’t changed: the sky, the trees, the grass, the smoke coming from the kitchen chimney. Banjo Paterson could be sitting next to me and out here on the land he’d hardly know it from 100 years ago.

It is hard to believe that all that has happened to me and all that I have done to others really happened. I scratch where my ears used to be a feel the hole in my head where the ice pick went in and I know it was real.

It must have happened for there to be a Chopper Read there must have been a life for him to lead and as I clean my glasses to put them back on my fat eighteen stone face I squint at the morning sun and wonder in puzzlement at the myth that is my own life … but not for long.

Fact is, she who walks on water has arisen, and I must down pen and attend to the septic tank. I’ve gone from court bail to bailing the dunny. It’s a shit of a job but it’s better than being in jail, that’s for sure.

I HAVE a friend in America named Sam Risovich, from Sparks County, Nevada. I have kept in touch with him for some time. Big Sam Risovich sends me books on the wild west and the old gun fighters, a great love of mine. Then he sent me a book called
The Official Guide to the Best Cat Houses in Nevada.

An Italian friend of mine was visiting Las Vegas, Nevada. His name is Charlie Monza and I insisted he visit the famed Mustang Ranch just east of Reno Nevada, Storey County. Charlie said he knew the guy who owns it or used to, a bloke called Joe Conforte.

The Mustang Ranch is eight and a bit miles from the Reno Nevada Hilton Hotel. You take interstate eighty east to the Mustang off ramp exit twenty-three miles, drive straight ahead about a mile, just past the auto wreckers on your right and follow the road under the railroad tracks and the Mustang Ranch will be right in front of you. The most famous whorehouse in America and guess what?

There is a lady there named Ingrid and another named Cherry who have read every single one of my books. I always said hookers have top tastes in matters of culture. Evidently my books and my two CDs are collectors items in certain areas of America such as whorehouses and state and federal prisons, not to mention a few Sheriffs’ Departments and the odd mental home.

If they knew that the boy in the book had become an alcoholic chicken farmer who looks more like Colonel Sanders than Hannibal Lecter they would be shattered. But to Sam Risovich and family I say thanks for the friendship and remember, don’t believe everything you read unless the author has an extensive criminal record. Ha ha.

CHARLIE Monza is a tough little Sicilian. La Casa de la Monza. We have been friends since our school days and if I have to be pushed in to it, I guess I’d have to say Charlie is what the movies would call a made man. He lives in Punta Raisi, a suburb of Palermo, Sicily. Punta Raisi is where the Palermo Airport is.

It’s not the posh end of town — if Palermo has a posh end, that is. But the Monza crew openly control the airport. It’s an open secret. The kid from Thomastown ended up becoming a real life Robert de Niro. What Alphonse pretended to be, Charlie Monza and Tommy Caprice, both former Thomastown boys, are in real life.

They are now both so high up in their own world they are the dreams men like Alphonse have when they are under the doona having a fiddle.

What goons like Alphonse could never grasp was that it was never about money — neither Charlie or Tommy would own more than two pair of shoes each. One for day wear, one pair for church, weddings and funeral. And these guys are in their own quiet, polite modest manner the men Hollywood make such a fuss of. We exchange postcards and letters and the odd phone call. Their business is their business. They think my books are high comedy and they would know.

Oops, speaking of business, the man coming in to put in the new wood heater in the top room wants to use the toilet and I haven’t unblocked the septic tank. Back soon.

Now if you want your train of thought to be upset, unblock a septic pipe with your bare hands. The critics always said I was full of shit and maybe they were right all along.

Where was I? Yes Charlie and Tommy, the only two people on earth who loved my crime fiction books and thought my real life books a bit of a yawn. You can’t please everyone. Oh well.

We now have a second wood heater installed and the washing machine blew up. Life on the farm is a stagger from one broken thing to the next. The septic tank has been emptied by hand and bucket.

I’m going up the pub. I don’t know about your temper but mine is slightly frayed at the edges. The washing machine man has now arrived. I still haven’t got to the pub.

For an alcoholic with a history of criminal insanity this is most upsetting but I cannot leave until he goes. To think that a man once considered one of the most dangerous criminals in Australian history must now wait for the washing machine repair man.

Ned Kelly would turn in his grave. The whole thing is quite Monty Python. I don’t believe any of this is really happening. Barman, where are you when I need you?

I’VE just returned from the pub (burp). A quick dozen ten ounce beers does wonders for the human condition.

Did I tell you that old Doug Young sold the Richmond Arms Hotel to Damien Waller and John Young, both sons of policemen? Damien is the stepson of Assistant Commissioner Barry Bennett. Damien and John hired me as the bouncer.

I mean the whole pub was run by coppers, owned by coppers, Barry Bennett’s young son. Ty Bennett, himself a policeman, lived above the pub.

Off duty cops drank in the place. The whole pub was wall to wall police and they hired me as the bouncer.

When they called last drinks I asked young Ty Bennett and his friends to leave, not knowing the bloke lived in the pub. I was patrolling the car park and a well-known local lass was bent over the bonnet of a HQ Holden getting some close attention in the pants department from an off-duty policeman.

She was getting frisked — the hard way. If that’s the way they do a search these days I’m glad I’ve turned honest.

I saw the lady’s husband inside and, when questioned, told him she was being ill in the lady’s toilet. He accepted this, not asking me how the hell I’d know.