Chopper Unchopped (246 page)

I thought to myself, “How long’s this shit been going on?” So I got hold of some acrylic paints and a brush and took it up.’

Adam Cullen described it as post-modernist, neo-surrealist rubbish. It looks good up on walls, goes up in price, and fits good into the back of a BMW.’

‘THEY tell me I shouldn’t profit from crime – then they ring me up for an interview. Funny thing is they get paid for it. I don’t.’

‘AT my wedding I had old crooks, loyal friends, family and a table of reporters. On each table was a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and Absolut Vodka. The reporters drank more than everyone else and then stole the booze on the way out. And they are the moral conscience of the nation. Go figure.’

‘TV reporters try and beat me up on camera and then want an autograph after. And they call me a conman.’

‘THE gunnies from the Wild West that are famous aren’t those that were the fastest on the draw. They were the ones who teamed up with the drunken reporters from the penny dreadfuls.’

‘NOT all the dangerous men get talked about in the newspapers or end up in courtrooms or prison cells.’

‘SOME of these so-called experts make me laugh. They are a veritable font of knowledge. They wouldn’t know what they are talking about. They wouldn’t know a crook if they woke up to find Marlon Brando trying to put a horse’s head in their bed.’

‘DERRYN Hinch and me have a lot in common. Our livers are shot and we both like shooting at easy targets.’

‘ALAN Jones and me are no longer on speaking terms. He had a go at me and seemed hurt when I recalled he was involved in a misunderstanding with a policeman in a public toilet in London. Men in glass toilets shouldn’t throw gallstones.’

‘COME to think of it, there’s an opening here for a good gunman to do strategic wounding of celebrities who can’t cut the mustard any more. Think of the press coverage the occasional well-placed bullet would get.’

‘A MAN has to know when to leave the party. If I had stayed, I would be dead. Jason and Mark Moran, Alphonse Gangitano – they couldn’t hear the barman call last drinks. For them it was the
Last Post
’.

‘I AM deeply ashamed if my use of a blowtorch on drug dealers has had any lasting environmental impacts.’

‘WE have thousands of prisoners sitting around in million-dollar jails planning their next crimes and going out of their minds with boredom. Instead of having them sitting on psychiatrist couches telling lies, let’s go back to the old-fashioned road gangs. Get them out in the bush. You want an irrigation pipe from Queensland to Victoria? You want trees planted along the way? Let’s get half the junkies in jail out in the fresh air and sweat the poisons out of them. Have we forgotten half the main roads in Australia were built with convict labour? – signed Chopper Read, unemployed.’

‘TERRORISM, whether it be political or criminal, rarely achieves what people hope it will. It normally is a massive failure. The IRA has been blasting the hell out of the British for years and all it has achieved is to make the Brits more determined to dig in. The same with the PLO with the Israelis. The harder one side pushes the more the other one digs in.

In Australia, we have had the Hilton and Russell Street bombings and the shooting of two policemen in Walsh Street. All three acts can be classed as terrorism and what did they achieve? They only strengthened the resolve of the politicians, police and the public. The immediate response is to give the police more funds and power. It strengthens the resolve of the police and bonds them together. If anything, it makes the police a tougher enemy.

It seems to me that terrorism is a weapon of anger and not of intelligence.

As I have stated before, to me revenge is a holy duty. It is not something to be loudmouthed about in pubs, or to big-note about. It is not just something that “should be done”, but something that “must be done”. In some way, either by my own hand or by my hand guiding the hand of another, I have always had my revenge. In the revenge department, I see myself as something of a puppet master. I didn’t kill Alex Tsakmakis, but he is dead.

The use of terror tactics by criminals against criminals works a treat. It is an underground war where people like me can succeed. But using terror against the people, or the police protecting the people, political targets or any of the armed services, simply won’t work.

The only time terrorism works is when the target has no moral outrage. The Jews used terror to kick the Brits out of Palestine, but the Brits needed Palestine like a hole in the head. Terrorism may work against an enemy who believes he is in the wrong, but it will never work against an enemy who believes he is in the right.

Righteous indignation takes over and no force on earth can defeat that.

Terrorism defeats itself when it creates outrage in its victims.’

‘IT seems to me that the modern political scene is bullied and pushed, if not at times controlled, by small lobby groups. They are made up of blinkered people convinced that their single interest issue is the most important thing in the world.

There are the Greens, Greenpeace, Save the Whales and hundreds of other environmentally friendly, boring groups. You also have various ethnic lobby groups, sex groups, professional interest groups and sundry others. There must be hundreds of whacked-out nutters who have formed their own action factions.

Meanwhile, the Japs are buying every square foot of land they can get hold of and Vietnam has taken over major parts of Australia without firing a shot or digging a single tunnel.

While the greenies are saving our wildlife, forests and waterways, our children are dying in the gutters and back alleys of the nation of drug addiction. While the gay lobby is fighting hard for their political rights, and the various women’s groups are kicking up a storm, children are hocking their bums and fannies in the brothels, massage parlours and escort services of the country.

There are plenty of lobby groups prepared to march in the street to save albino water fowl, yet no-one seems to utter a word of outrage that a generation of Australian children is being destroyed by drugs. No-one seems to care about what really matters. Wake up before it is too late.’

‘DAD said, “Remember that, son. If ya ever need to ‘sneak go’ a dago, ya can always get the bastards while they are having dinner. The buggers take all day. I can’t stand these bastards who play with their food.’ ‘There are three sorts of people who dilly dally at the dinner table, son … wogs, poofters and members of the royal family”.’

‘THE more I see the way poor old Aussie land is going, the madder I become. I grew up as a good little racist under the white Australia policy and like every other red-blooded Aussie kid of that era, enjoyed putting a goodly bit of comical shit on the Abos, spooks, coons, slopes, chows, dagos, spags, spics, greasers and wogs – and whatever other third-world gin jockey or porch monkey that came along. And what bloody good fun it was.

Yet the same Aussie kids would put shit on the Germans for what they did to the Jews and we always enjoyed hating the filthy Japs for what they did to the Diggers during the Second World War.

We all grew up racist, but we picked and chose. There were exceptions and contradictions to our racist rules and all in the name of fun. We would put shit on the Abos, yet jump to their defence if any outsider such as some wog tried to put shit on what was after all the real Australian. We were, and still are, a confused lot of buggers indeed.

Australia has no religious hatreds apart from the fact that everyone’s dad was either a Catholic or a Freemason. We would happily put shit on every wog in town, except of course for the Italian and Greek kids we classed as our friends, because they weren’t wogs, they were our mates.

The wogs were the buggers from the next suburb we fought with on Saturday night.

As far as our racist attitudes went, we invented the rules as we went along, making exceptions for friends and allowing all sorts of contradictions to our elastic rules. I guess you could say that our racist attitude was a rule of law that we applied nine out of ten times. Sporting identities, boxers, footy players and wog chicks with big tits were the general exceptions, and our friends of the non-Australian variety.’

‘THE criminal world is multiculturalism’s showcase. Here crims don’t care where you’re from, only if you can do the business. Here a fat white boy may use a Lebo hitman to go after an Italian. A Viet drug importer may sell his heroin to an Aussie trafficker in a Chinese restaurant. A mafia wiseguy might go to the footy with his Aussie-born lawyer. A Turkish standover man may end up in a dim sim machine after he has punched a hole in his manners. And they all want an American Express platinum card. The criminal world is one big glorious melting pot. Al Grassby would be pleased if he wasn’t dead, which means he’s probably lost interest.

The Sicilians will threaten to kill your mother. The Vietnamese really will kill your mother. However, the Albanian mafia will actually not only kill your mother but put the body in the cooking pot. The KGB didn’t use the Albanians as hitmen for nothing. Next to the Irish, they would be the greatest mental cases in the criminal world.

Ever wondered why there’s no Mafia in Ireland?’

‘MY own view is that the Middle Eastern political groups are wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. I suspect they have a hidden agenda.’

‘THE Asians’ taste for blood is a tad greater than those who control the areas at the moment … killing the family of an enemy is part of the Asian criminal culture. That’s one reason why I would say the little chaps will climb right to the top of the criminal ladder.’

‘THE Italians changed the face of the criminal world in Australia in the 1960s with the mafia and the “black hand” murders in the Melbourne markets. I’ll give the rice eaters until the year 2000. By then, mainstream criminals, including the Italians, who have not come to some form of friendly agreement or understanding with these evil little men will have to make their own arrangements, with one eye in the back of their heads.’

‘THE Jap crims are the subject of some interesting chat. One fellow I know, a top crim, has told me personally that the first Jap he sees with tattoos or a missing finger, he will cut his head off and put it in a pickle jar.

Where is the logic, you ask? That’s why the head-hunter and blood merchants can’t be beaten. There is no logic. You ask why. I say, “Why not?” The head-hunters and blood merchants, though few in numbers, could be seen as a criminal version of pest control. Criminally speaking we’ll put up with the wogs and tolerate the Vietnamese – but we are not going to cop the bloody Japs, let me tell you.

But the Vietnamese will keep coming back, and if they get hold of the right killing weapons, there will be bodies dropping.

I’d rather be backed up by one hated arsehole who can stick fat than a hundred popular show ponies who can’t keep their mouths shut. I can name a lot of crooks, including myself, who could turn around tomorrow and say I know where the body is buried or I know who did it, just to get out of jail. Traitors are shot in wartime, but in peacetime they are encouraged and protected.

The great Australian moral code is a thing of the past.’

‘THERE are bludgers around this great country who have jumped on the Abo welfare gravy train, claiming they are part of some tribe or another. They think that because their great-great-grandfathers once waved at Truganini from a distance of 300 yards, they can claim Aboriginal descent and jump on welfare bus.

If you have feathers and webbed feet, if you swim in water and go quack, quack and look like a duck then it’s a safe bet you’re a bloody duck, it doesn’t matter if your great-great-grandfather was a bloody budgie. If you have white skin and blond or red hair or any colour hair, for that matter, then you’re white. It’s no use trying to say you’re a black man.

I reckon the Aussie Abo is a good bloke and good luck to him. It’s these white false pretenders that create all the trouble. I’m not dirty on the poor old dinky-di Abos. I don’t think any Aussie is, but I am a bit dirty on the snow white “Koori” fakes who on the strength of nothing, or a teaspoon of Aboriginal blood a hundred years back, expect the Aussie taxpayer to wipe their backsides for them for the rest of their lives. The whole thing has gotten out of hand. The whiter they get the more they bloody want. They’re as bad as the bloody public servants.’

IN August 1994, the Victorian Government finally closed the most notorious section of the prison system, H Division.

‘THE modern prison is a marshmallow compared with good old H. It was the last place from the old hard school and in my heart I preferred the old days to the system that we have now. A good flogging can concentrate the mind.