Chopper Unchopped (216 page)

I’m supposed to talk to some bloke named Guido Hatzis on the radio tomorrow. He’s some half-crazy fake Greek radio comic who loves to take the piss out of people.

I just hope Guido isn’t related to anybody I’ve shot or had to hurt. The list of Greeks I’ve come up against is almost as long as the list of Italians, not to mention the Turks. I’m no racist. I’ll shoot anyone regardless of race, colour or creed.

My writing is constantly being interrupted with phone calls from the media. ‘What are you doing these days?’ is always one of the many questions.

‘I’m trying to finish my tenth book,’ I reply. What I don’t say is that if you wombats stopped ringing me every bloody day I might be able to finish the bloody thing. But let’s be honest, when they do ring it’s a pest but when they don’t ring it’s a worry. That’s the business I’m in now, so I just have to cop it sweet.

One female reporter who I won’t name is an arts writer for one of the big newspapers. I don’t think she has ever written a nice word about me in her career yet when we talk on the phone it’s always the height of comic conversation.

The media in Australia all seem to like me in private yet feel that in the name of political correctness they have to follow the party line and bag me publicly.

The overseas and international media I’ve spoken to couldn’t care less. They haven’t been raised on a diet of Chopper Read stories over the past 26 years. I’ve talked to Australian media people who were hearing stories about me when they were doing media studies at school, so it’s a bit hard for these people to be objective.

As much as they try to be fair, they know that their editors or publishers or radio or TV bosses all have a set opinion on Chopper Read and, in general, it’s not a good opinion. It’s only a rare few that have the guts to offer their own opinion uninfluenced by their masters.

American authors can have criminal records as long as both their arms and the Aussie media will crawl up their bums for an interview. But the ‘We hate Chopper Read Club’ is an established firm in Australia and new chapters are growing all the time.

I doubt that they will turn around and all start loving me tomorrow no matter how many AFI nominations or awards the movie picks up.

Who was it who said that a prophet is never recognised in his own land? I am, in the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, ‘A poet and a picker, a prophet and a pusher, a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when I’m stoned; I’m a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on my lonely way back home.’ Amen.

I’VE just gotten hold of the name of the Friday night gangster who got himself shot, and who some police and media are trying to blame for offing Mad Charlie before his corpse is even cold. He was some no name, would-be, make believe Mafia punk named Dino DiBra. That’s quite right, yes, yes I know. I’ve never heard of him either. I think his only claim to fame was that he once waved at Larry Lambert from a distance of 300 yards and, as we all know, poor Larry only had a 250 yard claim to fame on Alphonse Gangitano.

So when blokes I’ve never heard of – 25-year-old punk puppies – are being held up in death as Mafia gangsters and no one’s ever heard of them, I know it goes to show a gaping void of professional talent left alive in the Melbourne criminal world.

I stand corrected after another phone call, I must amend that remark, re gaping void of professional talent. We are forgetting the bloke who pulled the trigger several times on Dino DiBra – yes, the hitman. As always, the unsung hero whose name never seems to get a mention. The clue, as my friend on the phone said with a giggle, is ‘Surf’s up’.

I replied ‘I thought you knocked those three wombats.’

‘We did, we did,’ came the comic retort. ‘But they were not the only boys on the beach.’

As my friend hung up he was singing the old Beach Boys classic,
Let’s Go Surfing Now.

‘I’m getting too old for this shit,’ I thought to myself, as I went out the back to hang up baby Charlie’s wet washing.

As I mentioned previously, I had to talk to this insulting wog bastard Guido Hatzis on Triple M radio. He called me Whopper instead of Chopper. I told him if I pulled my pants down he’d know why they called me Whopper. Guido Hatzis is a radio comedian, real name Tony. He is the master of personal abuse aimed at the unsuspecting. Quite funny, really. I’ve never shot a Greek I didn’t like, so no offence was taken. Although I did burn Nick the Greek’s house down …

My life is entering the twilight zone. I meet people and they seem quite nice but within a short time they are into me for something or other.

Pretty girls want me to put them in the movies. Ugly men want me to introduce them to the pretty girls so they can make their own private movies.

Some men want me to kill their wives and some wives want me to kill their husbands. There are autograph hunters and head hunters who want me on their side. Then here are those who think I am rich and are looking for a quid.

It took me 30 years to become an overnight success. And, yep, that’s the cue for my coach’s address for success the Chopper way. Remember this, folks: everyone you want and whatever you want will walk towards you if you are willing and ready to meet it half way.

But most people are only dream merchants, too lazy to take that first step. They wallow in a sea of jealousy and resentment because someone else of lesser importance and lesser ability reached the Promised Land before them.

What they forget is that the other person had greater drive and a greater personal motivation. That’s all it’s about.

If you want to write a book, write one. Want to make a movie? Make one. Want to be a photo model? Get your photo taken a thousand times and haunt the magazines. Be an actor, bang on their fucking door till they have to open it and don’t leave till you are dragged away, then return next day.

No glory without guts, as the old saying goes. Do you really think I would let Suzanne Soul the artist onto my place if she hadn’t driven my publisher and myself mad?

She wouldn’t go away until she got what she wanted. In the end that sort of grit has to be admired, not commended. If someone swims 100 miles through a sea of shit to climb aboard your boat then, fine, they deserve a ride. But I’d toss a stowaway overboard.

Next topic, thank you. Maybe I should write a motivational book. I could call it
Do Better, Or I’ll Shoot You.
It would slay them.

MY ongoing battle to have my firearm prohibition order lifted continues. I need a gun while working on the farm. Even Ghandi would want a shooter if he lived down here, what with the snakes and vermin. And now we have the fear that a fox has been smuggled in to Tassie and is going to breed up. All right thinking people should praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and eradicate the fox before the invasion starts.

Anyway, I continue to haunt Police Commissioner Richard McCreadie with requests that he reconsider the situation. His last two letters sent to me have given me some hope. Is he hinting that if I took the matter to the Magistrates’ Court that the whole thing could be reconsidered.

I will enclose the Police Commissioner’s last two letters and let you be the judge. Chopper Read issued with a firearm permit. It will be a political hot potato and an otherwise small and normally short hearing before a magistrate would be turned into a media sideshow.

Politicians and police spokespersons would be asked to make comment. Any magistrate would feel pressured and I don’t think I will apply this year.

But I will have to brief his immortal holiness Michael Hodgman QC and dispatch him to the Magistrates’ Court in relation to this matter sooner or later. Chopper Read without a firearm permit, the whole thing is not only outrageous, it’s downright un-Australian.

LET’S do lunch. I found myself sitting by the Hobart waterfront in the sunshine with my pain in the neck, loud mouth, big noting, larger than life, old aged playboy, over-the-hill yuppie, millionaire-nightclub-owner mate, Shane Farmer.

The Tasmanian premier, Jim Bacon, looked fried as he was doing some sort of TV interview not too far away. As our lunch ended, Farmer, as always, left me to pay the bill.

As I counted out the cash the media and TV people were getting set to interview Honey’s husband. That’s right, Jim Bacon’s wife’s name is Honey. Don’t you love it?

There are about a thousand different comic remarks one could make about any lady named Honey, but if you add Bacon on the end of it, that number blows out to about 2000. As Farmer and myself walked towards the media people and the premier we could hear the whispers ‘it’s Chopper Read.’

The premier ducked to one side to get out of our way. I slapped him on the shoulder and said in a voice that could be well heard, ‘You’re a credit to the party, Jim.’ He gave a nervous laugh and the media crews cracked up – or were on crack. I couldn’t be sure. As I walked away, I said to Shane Farmer in a stage whisper that could be heard back in the mainland: ‘How did he get into the ALP. We would have shot the wombat 20 years ago.’ It was a joke, Jim.

Jim Bacon looks like a heavyweight on TV yet when I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the bone structure he definitely felt like a bantamweight to me. They say TV puts pounds on.

Thank God I’m in top nick.

We then headed off to Charles Touber’s million-dollar, luxury beach-side, true-believer, ALP-to-his-boot-straps mansion and spoke deeply about the sad plight of the working class by the swimming pool. Need I say more? I don’t think I should.

Just because you rooted a few gangsters doesn’t mean you are one. Not a very nice saying, but true. One thing I can’t cop is some wombat whose only credentials are that he or she knew or knows a few crooks writing books about crime and punishment.

I’m told my book, the first one I wrote, is being repackaged and along with a collections of photos is to be released in the UK about the same time as the
Chopper
movie. It is big in South Africa, but they’re mad; a hit in New Zealand, but they’re poor. I have been profiled in magazines and newspapers in France, America, Canada, South Africa and Bongo Congo. International fame at last. And well deserved too.

Michele Bennett is the unsung heroine of the movie. She’s the girl with more guts than many crooks I know, who stuck with the project for years to produce the bloody thing. I hope she makes a big quid. I wish I could too, but then I can’t get paid because I’m an old crook and they’re not allowed to make money from anything but being brickies’ labourers for rich folks, I guess.

She sent me a book called
Ronnie Kray – Sorted
by Kate Kray, published by Blake Publishing Ltd of 3 Bramber Court, 2 Bramber Road, London W149PB, England.

As I read through this collection of old facts and so-called new facts – I would be the last to call anyone a liar – I came to her last sentence. It read like this: ‘I have now started a new chapter in a new house and am busy writing a new book about the subject I know best. “Tough Guys” What else?’

Well, I’ve got a sentence for Kate. ‘You ain’t never shot no-one in ya life darling, so piss or get off the pot.’

I used to love the Kray twins, but reading these penny dreadful books put together by the various general dogs bodies who knew them, I’m starting to reconsider. I was shooting people in the legs at the age of 15. I carried out my first professional paid murder at 18 and, not to put too fine a point on it, after the third killing Dave the Jew said to me ‘Well, Chop Chop, we beat the twins’ record.’ I don’t think he was talking about the Bedsers. (They’re twins who played cricket, you fool.)

I was 23 by then and it was five murders, not three, however the Kray brothers remained my heroes. It makes me almost vomit to read this latest Kray brothers crap. Blake Publishing will be handling my book. Thank goodness, I will be raising the literary standards of the old country. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Captain W.E. Johns and Chopper Read. Who would have thought?

I read a book and if I can pick out one thread then the whole book unravels as a collection of very clever, well put together stories which I accept are yarns and not facts. And I only stick to the facts in my books. Don’t I?

I loved the Krays, not for their toughness or their brutality, which to me was little more than school yard nonsense. I loved them because they were the first crims outside America to adopt the Hollywood style of packaging. They took nothing and created an international English legend. To write yourself into the pages and fabric of a nation’s history using little more than smoke and mirrors and bullshit is to be commended. They are the true and perfect example of the Psychology of Fear. They made other people believe they were dangerous using the Psychology of Fear.

Let’s be honest, half the Kray firm was made up of semi-crooked businessmen and after-dark club owners and the other half was made up of psycho shirtlifters and between the bunch of them they whacked out about three men. They reigned for about 15 years and killed just three men. I’ve known card carrying pacifists who have killed more.

Any gang running around Melbourne who only killed three men in approximately 15 years wouldn’t get their names written on the back of a toilet door. So yes, I do admire the Krays for their showmanship and their brilliant use of psychology to get legend status but I wish their wives, girlfriends and toilet cleaners would stop writing bloody books about them. It’s starting to get quite depressing. What would they have been known as in Australia. The Yabbie Brothers?

DAVID McMillan was one of the first major heroin traffickers to be arrested in Australia. Charismatic, young, confident and from a privileged background, McMillan was arrested in 1981 joint police taskforce, code named Aries.

He employed a former British SAS soldier to try to fly a helicopter into Pentridge as part of an escape plot. It sounded like a fantasy – until it was successfully done in Queensland years later.

McMillan was sentenced to 17 years jail but was released in 1991 declaring he would make a fresh start.

But two years later he was arrested in Thailand and again convicted of heroin trafficking. But McMillan always had money and dash. He was later to escape. His precise whereabouts is not known to police, but there are people in Melbourne who are believed to speak to him regularly in the United Kingdom.

DAVID McMILLAN was a yuppie millionaire bum. When I first knew him we were both in the maximum security Jika Jika division Pentridge back in the early 1980s. He fell out with Alex Tsakmakis and put a contract on his head.

Mad Alex, a millionaire himself, simply doubled the amount and McMillan found himself on protection along with his yuppie mate, Michael Sullivan. Alex Tsakmakis was not a man to be messed with and he could buy or sell McMillan and his mate, Sullivan, out of petty cash. Also, Tsakmakis was building himself a Pentridge power structure. However, it was rumoured that McMillan and Sullivan were bribing screws, even very senior ones. Their power structure was based on cash and they were willing to spend. Alex Tsakmakis was too cheap to pay a proper bribe. His idea of a bribe was to tell whoever what he wanted and if it wasn’t carried out he’d spend five, 10 or 20 grand getting your wife, sister or mother shot.

Sullivan could have represented Australia as a pole vaulter. I couldn’t see the purpose of the sport, although I myself would occasionally run around with a big stick. But, I digress.

Michael once asked the prison authorities for a pole so he could practice. Even they twigged when they found he could clear six metres, and some of the walls were about five metres. What he lacked in brains he made up in stupidity. McMillan and Sullivan were way out of their criminal depth tangling with the mad Greek but they did survive their sentence via bribes and corruption and being classed as high risk protection prisoners. I promptly forgot them as non events. Not worthy of note until people mentioned them to me recently, asking if I remembered anything about them.

My reaction was: ‘What? Those bums? You want me to waste my time writing about those semi faggot, lah de dah, yuppie arse wipes?’

So here goes.
(Get on with it. – Ed.).

WHEN Dave the Dog got out of the Bangkok Hilton on a hot August night, to quote an old Neil Diamond song, no-one had ever busted out of Klong Prem Prison in recent memory. This was 1996. McMillan, aged 40, then was in a cell with four Thai inmates on the first floor of the joint. He used acid to weaken the bars, broke them, then squeezed his skinny half-junkie body through the bars and lowered himself to the ground using electrical flex. He got past the prison dining hall and a ‘paid to sleep’ guard, got a paid-for bamboo ladder, got over the wall, cut barbed wire with a cutter, also paid for and waiting for him.

He gets through electrified cables unseen by any of the guards, undoubtedly paid to look the other way, and with a paid helper in the shadows ran to the canal and swam through a river of Klong Prem shit and vomit to a waiting car and vanished.

I have got no idea why Thailand is still poor after all the money they got out of Macca. His bribe money would have kept a small country afloat.

You have to pay for cars, ladders, cutters and Old Spice to cover the smell of a dip in poo river.

All hell broke loose (shock, horror, he’s gone!) Big deal. He remains the only Westerner to this day to escape from the ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Or so the story goes.

I’ve heard other yarns that various UK criminals and American Mafia guys have been driven out of the prison to the airport and had all their paper work destroyed for $US20,000 cash which, in Bangkok, is a King’s Ransom. Would go all right in Tassie, I’ve got to tell you. So I don’t place much faith in the yarn that McMillan won when other men lost. Klong Prem is a turnstile, cash prison (no Eftpos), meaning if you don’t have the cash you rot or die, but if you have the cash and it goes into the hands of the right police and military personnel you are on your way.

For 20 to 25 grand you will get a ride home – or a bullet in the head on the way to the airport. (With any luck you get frequent fliers with that, not Ansett I hope).

After the escape cash has been handed over. The smart idea is to place five grand in hand and 15 grand after the police and military clear you through the airport – which, of course, would cost another few grand to sweeten the airport police and military personnel. They are separate units with their own bribe ideas. That includes GST (Greedy, Slippery Thais).

I don’t know about you but I’m bored already. I’d rather talk about the little Greek babe Katerina and her telling me with a wink, ‘How come all the good looking guys are married?

I have the funny feeling that Miss 160 IQ Katerina was playing me like a fine violin. I would have preferred she played the pink oboe. Anyway, back to McMillan. Yes, I know, bugger McMillan, and let’s hear more about the little Greek head spinner, but this is a crime book and I have an obligation to include these shit heads.
(Mark, please get your mind out of the gutter and back on the job, or should that be get your mind back in the gutter and out of the job? – Ed.)

Caulfield Grammar has punched out its fair share of freaks, such as the late Christopher Skase and that singer Nick Cave, and then there is David Peter McMillan. Like Skase (before the carked it), he is no longer in Australia. Or, like Nick Cave, he may be no longer on the planet Earth.

He faces three years jail time in Australia and the death sentence in Thailand if he is ever caught. But he’s gone. McMillan was a dreamer and a schemer with a restless creative spirit drawn to the dark side. He loved fast money and drugs. He was smart, ambitious and a heroin user.

He was in his early 20s when he got in on the ground floor of heroin dealing. He was a gifted photographer, cameraman and writer with enough contacts in the Melbourne television industry to do well.

But heroin got him where he wanted to get to quicker. He was a good talker and even got involved in gemstone smuggling. What’s the use of having a bum like a bucket if ya can’t jam a half pound of heroin up it and a small bag of uncut gems. No doubt about those old Caulfield Grammar boys.

I guess ya can’t spend the last three years at school being humped up the clacker by half the footy team and most of the cricket team without using a somewhat stretched bum to some good advantage. I won’t bore you with this wombat’s legal hassles. If my publishers wish to include a footnote they can.
(What, us work? No way. – Ed)

Anyway, McMillan left Caulfield Grammar to go to Prahran High or the other way around. Mad Charlie went to Prahran High and lived in Caulfield. Mad Charlie was a lot younger but could still punch the guts out of every kid in the school. I don’t know the details but McMillan always claimed to know Mad Charlie and Mad Charlie always said ‘Yeah, that yuppie poof, you watch him. He’s on his way to a million bucks.’

I said, ‘So what?’

Mad Charlie continued talking. I should have known he had a plan. He may have been mad and but he wasn’t silly. That’s why he wasn’t called Silly Charlie. But I digress.

Charlie said, ‘When he’s rich we’ll have a million bucks and a dead fag in the boot of the car.’

It didn’t happen. The Macca is alive and Mad Charlie is dead so I suppose the pansy wins. And they say there is justice in the world. I would rather have one Mad Charlie by my side than ten drug rich, la-de-da types.

McMillan only worried about looking after himself. His girlfriend died in a fire at Fairlea women’s prison, and her family never forgave him. He got away. Good luck to him. If I saw him I would probably punch him and take ten grand for old time’s sake.

Yeah, he had charm, wit and style and he was a good looking bugger to boot and he had a sense of humour. He had glamour. He was a posh wide boy, a big noter. He was born a liar which means that fact and fiction didn’t matter, it was the story that counted. He created his own myth in 1973. He vanished from Caulfield Grammar and ended up at Taylor’s College and, quoting his friendship with a then 16-year-old Mad Charlie, became friendly with a former Marcellin College boy named Alphonse Gangitano who, as we all know, like Mad Charlie himself was later shot to death by some unnamed party who used to be a mate.