Chopper Unchopped (231 page)

If you are going to do it, don’t talk about it. If you’re not going to do it, then definitely don’t talk about it. He was at his brother Sal’s place when he saw the gunmen. He then knew the answer to the question and he also knew that he should never have asked it. He yelled out ‘No!’, which was an obvious waste of one of his last breaths, and then took off. He got about fifty metres, which wasn’t a bad effort.

Gerry was the pacemaker, but you can’t outrun a bullet.

The unfortunately named Sal Mannella has been wise enough to keep his head down since. Which is a pity because some scallywags on the radio love to take poor old Sal’s name in vain.

Shot dead in Beaumaris on May 8, 2000

I THOUGHT these Mafia blokes were supposed to know a bit about history. If Frank had an eye on what was happening, he might have taken early retirement rather than hanging around to take the lead redundancy package.

Frank’s old man was Liborio Benvenuto, who was the Mafia Godfather in Victoria in the good old days. The old man was polite and charming. He could always afford to be nice because few people wanted to see him turn nasty. Someone blew up his car outside the market in the 1980s and a short time later two blokes ended up at the bottom of the Murrumbidgee River minus a few working parts.

But after Liborio died, Frank could never step up to take his place.

He didn’t have that much when he died, but he did own $5000 worth of racing pigeons. Perhaps he should have been more interested in the other type – stool pigeons. Because someone gave him up big time. Benji Veniamin shot him, but instead of pissing off straight away, Benji should have looked in the boot of the car. There was more than $60,000 in old notes stashed in it. Ha ha, Benji.

Frank managed to press the speed dial on his phone to ring his mate Victor Peirce after he was shot, but it was already too late.

It wouldn’t have mattered if he had rung Christian Barnard. It was already all over.

If he had been able to say anything, it might have been ‘Benji’ or he might have said ‘Mark Moran’, who I have been told might have been taking in the sea air at Beaumaris around that time.

Victor later had a meeting with Benji to show there were no hard feelings and business was business. Didn’t do anyone any good as Benji, Victor and Mark all ended up very dead. Thank goodness I am just a peaceful painter these days. That underworld shit is pretty scary.

Shot dead while visiting a friend in a St Kilda motel unit on May 16, 2000

READ wrote of Mad Richard in 1994
: ‘Richard Victor Mladenich, spoke to the
Truth
newspaper a short while ago and called me unkind names.

Poor Richard. The last time I saw him was in H Division, Pentridge. He had fallen over and hit his head rather savagely on a sharp heavy instrument and was pissing blood at a fast and furious rate of knots.

I don’t know if it was an accident or if poor Richard was the victim of terrible foul play. Nevertheless, Richard is not a man who tells on people in police stations, so if he was attacked, his attacker went unpunished.

It was rumoured that I once put the blade of a garden spade through the right side of his skull, nearly killing him in H Division at Pentridge in 1989, but Richard stuck staunch and told police nothing. The two prison officers who witnessed it told police nothing, either. That’s how H Division ran back then. Ah, the good old days.

Richard was a loud mouth who could make you laugh on a good day and make you want to bury a spade in his head on a bad one. He didn’t know when to shut up.

Richard has had a long-running battle with the needle and his personality has taken a dive as a result.

For the life of me I don’t understand why he dislikes me so much. That accidental tap on the skull must have affected his state of mind and I am shocked and somewhat hurt that he could express any sort of ill-will toward me.

I will mention the dear boy in my prayers. Ha ha.’

After one of his many stints in jail, Richard tried to become a big player in the drug world, but he lacked the back-up. He aligned himself with Mark Moran and was a sort of minder. It wasn’t the first time that Richard backed the wrong horse. He was killed by another one of those nuts from the western suburbs, Dino Dibra. Mark Moran was shot about a month later. Richard got his because he was seen as a soldier for the Morans and the soldier always gets one in the head before the generals.

Richard was better at stand-up than standover. His killer knew where he was on the night he got it. Another one set up by a friend.

Shot dead outside his luxury home near Essendon on June 15, 2000

REVENGE is a dish best served cold and Mark was a marked man who was shot in cold blood over an old feud. Mark was a good-looking bloke with not a bad brain and I always felt he might have had a chance if he hadn’t been brought up in the world of crime.

His dad, another popgun gangster, Leslie John Cole, was ambushed and shot dead outside his Sydney home on November 10, 1982.

Now you can’t help who your dad is, but Mark never had a chance to start over because his dear old mummy, Judy, had already moved on to Lewis Moran.

So for Mark, it was a case of moving from the criminal version of the Beverley Hillbillies to the Griswalds – I’m talking about the Morons – sorry, I mean the Morans. His half-brother was Jason – another half-wit with a De Niro complex.

Mark hadn’t worked for years and lived in a house worth over $1 million. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

He was one of the young gangsters, into pop and pill-pushing. He was a major drug trafficker who liked to carry a gun with a laser sight. Might have helped him if was attacked by Martians, but not much good when he was ambushed by a fat drug dealer with an axe to grind and a shotgun to back it up.

He was another one who must have been set up by a friend. He left his house late at night and when he returned, the killer was waiting. That killer was Carl Williams and he had been there only ten minutes. His timing was impeccable. I suspected he was tipped off and knew exactly when the soon-to-be corpse would be back.

Mark had been with Jason when Jason shot Carl in the guts in a park eight months earlier. Mark told tough-guy Jason to shoot him in the head, but Jason thought he knew better. He thought if he shot Carl with a dum-dum in the tum-tum Fatty Williams would fall into line. But Carl wanted revenge and Mark was one of those who didn’t know the clock was ticking. There are two things you can’t help. Bad luck and a bullet in the brain. Sometimes you get both at once.

Dibra was shot dead outside his Krambruk Street, West Sunshine, home in October 14, 2000

WHEN Dino Dibra starts getting spoken of as a heavy hitter, we are all in deep trouble. A street punk with a shooter, he actually thought he was on the way up when he was on the way out. Criminal soldiers who think they will be generals are a penny a truckload. They end up in a cemetery or a prison cell.

What is it about the young gangsters of today? When I decided to take on the underworld, I studied the great Generals. I read the
Art of War
, I read history and I talked to old soldiers. I developed strategies, and I studied my enemies like a scientist studies specimens. I knew their strengths and weakness and I would know what they were thinking before they even thought it.

Then I recruited a handpicked squad of dangerous lunatics who would fight to the death for me. Today numb-nuts like Dibra think snorting speed and carrying a gun makes you a tough guy. He was a shocking driver, too. He was once put in jail and ordered off the road for five years.

In the criminal world, he was not considered a deep thinker. He tried kidnapping, but that wasn’t his go either. Now even Mr and Mrs Average would know if you wanted to kidnap someone you’d do it at night and pick somewhere people were not likely to notice you. But Dummy Dibra thought he knew better and grabbed a bloke off the street and put him in the boot in front of half the world.

Then he drove of like some woggy tough guy with the doof-doof music blaring. Trouble was the bloke flicked the boot latch at the lights and jumped out and ran off.

Dino and his team chased him, flogged him and chucked him back in the boot – in broad daylight in a Melbourne street in front of witnesses. Not the act of a master criminal. Police also had his house bugged, so when he rang his victim’s brother to demand a ransom, police recorded the lot. They also found some more evidence that was pretty handy … when they got there the bloke was still in the boot.

It’s enough to make you cry. Dino and his mate once pulled some innocent punter over after a minor traffic problem and pumped five bullets into him. A bit of overkill if you ask me.

Dibra probably was there when Mad Richard got shot in St Kilda, so he thought he was a gunman on the make.

But it wasn’t long before Dino copped his whack, care of his old mates Paul Kallipolitis and Benji Veniamin. If Dino had read
Chopper
, he would have known that most hits are carried out by your mates. Too late now. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. If you lay down with Benji, you didn’t get up at all.

Repeatedly shot in an Armadale park on March 22, 2001

BIG George was fast with his fists and slow with his brain. A bouncer with no neck, he had been one of those power lifters who thought steroids and bench presses make you a tough guy. He tried to prove it by beating up young bucks full of bad manners and bourbon and coke. George didn’t seem to know that you’ve got to bash someone of substance to build a reputation.

He also couldn’t work out that you just have to be strong enough to pick up a .38 revolver to put a hole in the biggest chests around.

He worked in pubs, sold some gear, bashed a few customers and then moved on. He never learnt the saying that you should pick on your own size.

Rumour has it that Big George finally flogged the wrong man out the back of a St Kilda nightclub. The young bloke didn’t go to the police but he did talk to Dad and Dad was a well-known crook who didn’t like his son and heir having holes punched in him by a bouncer on the make.

The crook bided his time and made a few calls. Soon a big Melbourne drug dealer made sure he became close to George. He thought he was on the road to riches when he was really standing on the pirate’s plank about to take the big dive.

He was being set up but was too stupid, too greedy and too full of steroids to know it.

When the time was right, he was invited to a meeting in a park. Goofy George should have stayed home and watched TV, but he went. He was never going to come back alive.

He went to a spot called Inverness Park in Armadale that was a perfect place for an ambush. There were five streets that ran into the park, so the killer had a choice of which way to go in and go out. In my younger days, if I needed to meet scallywags, I would pick the spot. I would know it and I would get there early. George didn’t know the joint and his street directory was open in his car on the page showing the park.

George walked in the park and copped it in the chest and then the head. He didn’t know his killer, but his killer knew him. He should have learnt lesson one for apprentice gangsters. Never trust your friends. He should have also learnt lesson two. Don’t flog the son of a seriously connected gangster unless you are prepared to go all the way.

Shot in his car in Bay Street, Port Melbourne on May 1, 2002

A CLASSIC story of a bloke addicted to crime who didn’t know his number was up until he got it between the eyes.

He was the luckiest bloke alive until he wasn’t. Vic helped organise the murder of two young coppers in Walsh Street, South Yarra, in 1988. A jury acquitted him but I always thought he would cop a bullet or 20 from the coppers later on (in self-defence, naturally). I was wrong about that. It was the crooks who got him in the end, not the coppers.

Walsh Street was a dog’s act. Peirce and his crew thought the armed robbery squad was hunting them down and they wanted revenge. But they didn’t fancy going up against the ‘robbers’, so the gutless wonders set some random ambush for any kid coppers they could find.
(Constables Stephen Tynan and Damien Eyre were shot dead after being lured to Walsh Street to investigate an abandoned car)
.

I’d known Vic since he was a kid. He was just 14 and starting off as a little crook when I met him. He was bright enough, but he had no chance. His half-brother was a lunatic crook named Dennis Allen. I belted Dennis within an inch of his life in B Division in Pentridge. I am not big-noting. A nun with a crook shoulder and a butterfly net could have flogged Dennis. He was not brave, just vicious. He killed many junkies with a needle and was the hotshot king of Melbourne, but when it came to standing toe to toe he would leave that for others.

His mother was Crazy Kath Pettingill. If she had had her tubes tied when she was young, there would have been half as many gunmen in Melbourne, I promise you, and the gene pool would be much improved. When she says, ‘Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?’ I would say it was a pistol. Carrying a loaded pistol with the safety off would be safer than sticking your weapon anywhere near Kath.

Dennis spent half his waking life selling drugs, a quarter sucking up to coppers to keep out of jail and the rest of the time trying to kill me. When it came to drugs, he was top rate, when it came to paying crooked cops or giving them information, he was dux of the class but when it came to trying to kill Chopper … it was like putting a three-year-old in a chess championship. He was out of his depth.

The only one of that group I had any time for was Peter Allen, who was a top jailhouse lawyer and not a bad bloke in his own way.