Chopper Unchopped (26 page)

IT was just after dawn on Thursday. November 14, 1991. The hatch on the cell door slid back. I could see the screw’s face through the slit. I’ve seen better heads on a pig dog, but this time I could have kissed him. This was the morning I’d sweated on for more than four years. And, off and on, for 12 years before that. All up, I’d wasted more than 17 years staring at cell walls: dreaming about good times on the outside, brooding about the bad times inside …

The door opened. The officer led the way through H Division, the toughest division of the toughest prison in Australia. Pentridge. The Bluestone College.

I stopped outside Franky Waghorn’s cell and tapped on the door. ‘I’m out. See ya, Franky,’ I muttered. The big bald beach ball with the most dangerous pair of hands in captivity had been a good mate inside. But even he hadn’t known I was leaving that day. News travels fast inside, and news like that could have made me very dead, indeed.

For the previous four months ‘jail friends’ had been showing an unhealthy interest in my departure date. Unhealthy for me, anyway, if certain parties on the outside had got wind of my movements.

The underworld is full of spies, and most of them are double agents. Mine had told me the Lygon Street Mafia had put the word out that they were very keen to know exactly when I’d be released. They are very formal types, these Italians, and I was a little concerned that they might want to give me a reception. But I considered I wasn’t up to social engagements of this nature, as I felt I wasn’t dressed for the occasion: I was wearing brand new blue jeans and a tee-shirt as my going away outfit, but I felt naked without a gun.

I knew I would be most vulnerable from the moment I walked out the reinforced door of Pentridge until I walked through the pressurised one of a Boeing jet flying out of Melbourne. It would be the only time my enemies – and there were plenty — knew they could catch me unarmed.

One plastic ‘godfather’ who’d gone on an indefinite holiday overseas only weeks before had left instructions that I should be in the ground with a bag of lime before he came home. I hate to be a party pooper, but I intended to disappoint him. I still do. I’ve never liked the bloke.

I made two quick calls on my way out. One was to get a cab. The other was to my girlfriend, Margaret. I told her to put a few iceblocks into a bucket of scotch, because I was on my way.

Pentridge is like a little city, made up of self-contained suburbs; it’s a long walk from the H Division cage to the front gate. When they finally opened the door I unconsciously flexed my wrists. It was the first time in nearly five years I’d been outside without wearing handcuffs. I was relieved that the taxi was waiting. I didn’t want to hang around.

The driver looked in the rearview mirror, sneaking a look at me. I could tell he didn’t like what he saw, but I couldn’t blame him. After all, it’s not every morning you pick up a 16-stone hitman covered in tattoos and no ears.

‘Where to?’ he mumbled. ‘The stock exchange,’ I said. ‘Where else?’ I couldn’t resist it. The bloke waited, and I killed off the joke. ‘No, mate. Collingwood.’ This time he believed me.

It was 7.02 am on the dashboard clock as the Falcon turned into Bell Street. I lit my first for the day. It was then I noticed the ‘no-smoking’ sign. Things had changed while I’d been inside. But the cabbie didn’t say a thing. He was no fool.

We pulled up outside Margaret’s joint. It was a $6 fare, but I handed the cabbie a tenner and told him to keep the change. I’ve always been a soft touch. Maybe it’s a hangover from the days when I used to touch other people for five grand a week.

I went in. I gave Margaret a peck. This was not the time for any romantic routines — and besides. Margaret’s brother Ronnie and uncle Charlie were part of the welcoming committee, and I’m an old-fashioned gent at heart. What she did give me was a huge glass of scotch, which I downed in two gulps.

It was 7.15. We had a chat and took a few photos. We sat at the kitchen table. It was surprising that after four and a half years on the inside, conversation didn’t exactly flood out. There was so much to say, but it was hard to find the words. There would be plenty of time for sweet talk when we were safely off the mainland.

Ronnie, a loyal friend, was ready for the one-way trip to the airport. We jumped into his silver-blue Datsun 240Z. It was a good, fast car — but I didn’t like it. It didn’t have a boot. I am very partial to boots, as long as I don’t have to get in them myself. I’ve only ever been in one, and that was enough.

I personally wouldn’t have the bad manners to put anybody in a boot — alive, that is. It’s far too uncomfortable for that.

Little Margaret was in the back seat. At five foot two she wasn’t too cramped. By 9 o’clock we were heading north to Melbourne airport. It was a good run. The ‘squareheads’ were heading the other way towards town in their thousands, like lemmings. The only nine to fiver I ever had was given to me by a smartarse judge for assault and battery.

It was an overcast but mild morning. As we slid past the factories I couldn’t help thinking that it would be the last time I would see Melbourne alive. I made a silent vow that this was, at last, a fair dinkum new start. And that I’d only ever be coming back across Bass Strait in a body bag. My head was spinning. My brain was jammed with so many thoughts I got a headache. I was sad to be leaving the old hometown for good. I was delighted to be out of Pentridge and back with Margaret with our whole lives ahead of us. And I hated not having a shooter.

As Ronnie got up to speed on the freeway (making sure he didn’t go over the 100 kph limit) I adjusted the passenger side rearview mirror and kept watch. I was looking for wogs with bad attitudes — and I don’t mean taxi-drivers who don’t use their blinkers.

I knew I could trust Ronnie to back me. But guts without guns in my world can be fatal. I hadn’t come this far to be a martyr to the mafia.

At the airport, we parked the car. There was plenty of time until the next plane to Tassie was due out. Too much time, I reckoned. I would rather have just jumped on a jet. I didn’t have any luggage to check in: prison had nothing but bad memories for me, and I didn’t bother with packing any mementos.

We had time to kill … but after 17 years in the joint I was an expert. We headed to the bar. It was 8.55, far too early for a beer. I ordered bourbon and cokes all round. It didn’t calm the butterflies in my guts, but it made them pretty happy.

I looked up on the departure board. Australian Airlines flight 539, Melbourne to Launceston, was boarding. There was no way on God’s Earth I was going to miss this baby. We queued to board with businessmen and a few holidaymakers. Did I look out of place? I didn’t give a shit. The ticket in my hand was my passport out of 20 years of violence, blood, grief and insanity. I had lost my closest mate, the best years of my life — and my ears.

As the big bird banked over Melbourne, I looked down and saw the tile roofs of Thomastown, where I’d lived most of my time as a kid. And I saw Pentridge, where I’d spent most of my life as an adult. It looked for all the world like an old-time fortified town, and it looked peaceful from up there in the sky. But I knew better. For me it would always be a cesspit of human vermin and weak-gutted mice. If I’d had a bomb to drop I could have done the world a big favor.

It was 10 o’clock when we landed. Back in H Division, Frankie and the crew would be doing the laundry. But I wasn’t, and I never wanted to again.

We grabbed a cab and told the driver to take us to the North Lodge Hotel. And that was the last anyone saw of Margaret and me for a week. We had a lot of catching up to do …

The only time we surfaced and left the hotel room was to go over to the park across the road. I thought about that park a lot when I was in jail the last time, because I had loved it when I was over in Tassie in 1987. I really hankered for its green open spaces and the ten friendly rock monkeys that live there. That’s the modern world … one short plane flight and you go from rock spiders in Pentridge to rock monkeys in Tassie. One nibbles nuts and the other … forget it. Ha ha.

We moved pubs because it was far too expensive for an ‘honest battler’ like me. Now it was time to get on with life. We jumped into a taxi and headed out to see my dear old dad at Ravenswood. We pulled up outside the little unit, and Margaret went to the door while I hid around the corner.

I heard her knock on the door and introduce herself. Dad said: ‘It’s about time I had a chance to meet you, young lady.’ She said: ‘Well, I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you, too, Keith.’

Then I jumped out. The old bloke nearly fell over backwards. Then he jumped forward and grabbed me in a bear hug. He might be old, but he hasn’t lost his strength. I hugged him back. We didn’t say much. We didn’t have to.

I was home. Later, I felt I should be put in one.

THE most frightening thing for me when I got out of jail in November 1991 was being sent shopping by Margaret with money and a neat little list, but no gun. Margaret didn’t think it was manners to take guns to the supermarket.

When I was doing the shopping I would always suspect that some people were staring at me, and I wasn’t being paranoid, as their eyes never seemed to leave me. I would dutifully get all the shopping on the list, plus about $100 worth of stuff we didn’t need, only to be told off when I got home.

After I was on
A Current Affair
on television, I was walking through a supermarket with Margaret when one fat lady, standing with a bunch of other fat ladies and a flock of very ugly children, screamed out, ‘Look, that’s the man who was on the telly.’ They all started to giggle and point me out. They started to chatter and carry on so I hid in the frozen food section until they lost interest.

At the checkout counter of another crowded shop I was saying, ‘yes please, I’ll have one of those, thank you, it’s a nice day, rah, rah rah’ in my best, most polite going-shopping voice, when the woman standing next to me said to the sales girl; ‘He’s the most polite killer I have ever heard’.

I laughed along with them but, really, I was quite embarrassed. Some people would actually complain to the management that I was in the shop. What do they think I am, a vampire?

Then there were other people who would ask me to autograph a copy of the book while I was standing at the checkout counter. In the end I left the shopping to Margaret.

There is not a gunman alive who frightens me, but I became terrified of people in shops, especially of fat ladies in lambs’ wool slippers. They would scream out, ‘Look, that’s the bloke on the telly. He’s a murderer.’

Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t cop that.

I HAVE a loyal and good friend who acted as a secret agent against a dangerous crew who wanted me dead. She risked her life for me and I will never forget her. Her name is Tracey Glenda Warren. She was the buxom young lady who acted as a double agent for me in matters of war with my enemy, the drug dealer Dennis Bruce Allen.

Tracey would cuddle up to Allen, but later tell me in detail the plans he had made for my death. It would drive him crazy that I always appeared to be one jump ahead of the psychotic little weed.

Now, there was nothing sexual between Tracey and me, although I have to admit that she was a top looker, with a 38-24-34 figure. I have many found memories about Tracey, but that is exactly what I want them to be: memories.

Well, imagine my shock and horror, when, two weeks after my release from Pentridge, she arrives on my dad’s doorstep in Launceston.

I was with Margaret and my dad when a cab pulled up out the front at Ravenswood. We were having a quiet cup of tea when there was this enormous ‘bang, bang’ on the window. I nearly dropped my scone at the noise.

It was a screaming and crying Tracey yelling. ‘Is that Margaret, I’ll kill the bitch’. Now Tracey is a big girl, and she was hysterical. I had to physically restrain her from rushing through the flat door and engaging in mortal combat with Margaret.

But little Margaret is not to be trifled with. She was heading in the other direction towards the kitchen, no doubt looking for the carving knife. This could have been a real blood bath.

I had to pick Tracey up, and she is no lightweight, and carry her to a taxi rank. She was then driven off, not without a hail of verbal abuse at my good self.

Despite this dispute, I still have a soft spot for her.

Hey, women … you can’t live with them, you can’t live without ’em. Pass the beer nuts.

I KNOW that the question of whether or not I really walked away from crime when I came to Tassie is on a lot of people’s minds. I know that police and crims don’t agree on many things but that many from both sides openly stated that I would be back in trouble sooner rather than later.

Well I am the only man who knows what is in my heart and let me say that I have turned my back on the Melbourne crime world and I will never return there.

All I can do is put my best foot forward. But if, now and again, I put my best foot on the thick neck of some smartarse, that is not returning to crime, for God’s sake.

But just because the lion has left the jungle, it doesn’t mean that he automatically turns into a monkey. I am what I am and I am who I am and I cannot and will not change my mental and emotional makeup. Walking away hasn’t meant that I have gone through a personality reconstruction. I have not become a born-again Christian, nor have I joined the Gay Liberation Movement. So when I came to Tassie I wasn’t going to be allowing two-bob gangsters to kick sand in my face when I went to the beach.

I am not involved in crime or the criminal world. I have turned my back on my former life, however, I would relieve any man of his heart and lungs with a double barrel shotgun if he tried to turn his hand against me or mine. In other words, hurt me or mine and I’ll cut your ears off, put a hole in your manners and I’ll rip your bloody nose off with a pair of multi-grips.

But the criminal world is no longer my business or concern, except in my newfound career as an observer and crime writer.

While some may think the pen is mightier than the sword, let me say that I will give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. I will not eat humble pie or cop shit from others. Am I asking too much? I think not.

I was quite happy to be left alone. But I don’t like being lied to, robbed or conned and I will not allow myself to be humiliated or belittled. Yes, I have walked away from it all and I will shoot any bastard who tries to drag me back into it.

I know it might sound a contradiction but while I look to the future my soul was tempered in the past.

I have not entered the priesthood, I have just turned my back on the Melbourne underworld, and that is all I ever set out to do. The people who are out to kill me, set me up, destroy me, betray me, lie about me and pull me down haven’t gone away.

I had no illusions when I arrived here that my life will be trouble free. However, compared to my past life, I have been almost Saint like. Perhaps they could call me Saint Chopper of the Pump Action.

PS: Some uncharitable people might say my present legal difficulties arising from the shooting of Mr Sidney Collins prove that I have already returned to a life of crime. Not so. I am quite simply a victim of a case of mistaken identity.

ONE little giggle I had in Tassie was when I bumped into a Melbourne crim I had done time with in H Division. He was an Italian crook, kick boxer and drug dealer.

He wasn’t hard to pick. There he was sipping a cold drink in my local, wearing slip-on shoes, an imported suit with hair gel by the bucket. He was in a pub with bikies and tough Tassie workers. Most of them still wear flares for the big night out.

I immediately wondered what this bloke was doing in the same pub that Margaret and I always attended for the big Sunday lunch.

He was here to buy guns, or so he said. I didn’t believe a word of it. He was making too many phone calls for my liking.

We agreed to meet the next day. Naturally, I believed that he had come from the mainland on the instructions of some of the Lygon Street Mafia – the plastic godfathers who seemed convinced I would one day return to Melbourne to deflate their big fat bellies with a sharp instrument. These were the so-called heavies who slept with the lights on in case big bad Chopper ever decided to have a working holiday in Melbourne.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we drove our Italian visitor to the banks of the South Esk River. I then put my arm around him in an almost fatherly manner, and explained that the South Esk flowed all the way to the sea and that the current was swift.

I told him that if the fish did not eat the flesh from a body before it got to the sea, that the bloated dead remains would float into Bass Strait, never to be seen again.

He went quiet. This made me sad, as I hate to see a guest look unhappy.

Then I told him that there was a plane flying to Melbourne within the hour. I gave him an alternative. The river, or a few drinks in the airport lounge.

Frankie said he was thirsty. I wasn’t surprised.

We drove to the airport. Frankie bought the drinks.

He must have had a pressing engagement he had forgotten about in Melbourne because he forgot to stop at his hotel to pick up his luggage.

Never mind. I am sure there are plenty of good tailors in Lygon Street.

Really, I was just having a giggle. But I don’t think Frankie knew that.

ONE important matter that I should mention is money, or lack of it. I have written a book and people seem to think I walk about all day in a smoking jacket stuffed full of cash and live on champagne and caviar. In fact, people think I have become a millionaire through writing. Let me tell you I made more money with a blow torch than a ball point. And I didn’t get too much out of the crime world either.

I have done most things in my life for a giggle, not for the money. But try to tell other people that. Government departments, legal aid offices — they all believe I am rolling in cash.

I have been told that because of the book, I will never get the dole, but what I have got from the book would not keep me in drinking money and ammo.

I have been told that I am supposed to have a secret bank account in Melbourne where there is millions stashed away. Well, I must have forgotten the branch account and the account number. Which is a pity, because I could do with a bit.

Sure, before Sid Collins was unfortunately shot, I had a fair amount of cash at one time and another, but most of that came from casino winnings, and it went back from where it came, with interest. It was fun while it lasted but it didn’t last too long.

I knew that I would never get the dole while there was one copy of the book on sale. The employment market was not exactly crying out for out-of-work gunmen and toe cutters.

I am proud of the book, but it was no magic wand for making money, believe me. I also have been the subject of some TV interviews. I have found to my cost that TV people pay you in greasy smiles and flap doodle. So for those who think I have made a fortune out of making an idiot of myself on television, forget it.

While I certainly don’t regret putting my life story on paper, the money earned is trivial compared to the massive headaches it has caused. Budding authors be warned: books are done for love, not lucre.

NOW, many of you will think that a respected (but misunderstood) literary figure like my good self would have plenty of common sense and brains. Sadly I appear to have gone out of my way to prove time and again that this is not so.

Once I got on the outside I thought the fresh air would clear away the cobwebs and that Margaret and I would live the quiet life.

I thought Tassie would be filled with wild life I could hunt and fish I could catch. But there is something else down this way which lured me into deep water.

The casino.

It hooked me. Underneath it all I am just like most other blokes about. I like a bet, a drink, a good woman and the chance to occasionally catch some garlic-breathing, drug-dealing swine and take his loot. Pretty normal, I reckon.

So when I saw the casino it was as if all my Christmases had come at once. I would go there nearly every day. But I was no mug punter, not me. I developed a system.

My system was so good it enabled me to lose money at twice the rate of any normal tourist. Over an eight-day period playing my simple system of roulette I managed to have $23,000 pass through my hands. From one hand to the other and then back to the casino.

I blew $5000 of my own dough in the process. That is $5000 of legal money, not money from the old days. Once I would just shrug the shoulders, jump in the car and visit a drug dealer.

It would be a simple matter of explaining that my good luck was his good luck and my bad luck I would also share with him. Most would understand and hand over the cash, even before the blow torch flame went blue.

But I digress.

As an honest man $5000 is a heap of readies. I would stay at the roulette table, sticking to my system and after a short time I could double, or triple my money.

Then I would get the fever, go crazy, and start to break my own system. I would bet in large amounts and then ‘bing, bang, bongo’ I would be broke.

I won $500 the first night, $5500 the next night, lost the rest the following and so it went on. One night I was more than $7000 up, then lost it in about ten minutes. I was getting into debt over gambling and that was crazy.

One night I was playing roulette at the casino and my luck was really in. Within three hours I had won $7000. Within another hour I didn’t have a cab fare. As I was about to leave the croupier who had spun the wheel and seen me lose a fortune said: ‘Hey, Chopper, I knock off in 10 minutes, can you hang about and sign your book for me?’

Bloody cheeky bastard. Nevertheless, I did hang about and sign it for him.

Margaret was furious and I finally snapped out of it. I would go up there with $100 or $200 and walk away. In all things the power to walk away at the right time separates victory from defeat.

When I left Melbourne and the life and death blood rush I lost something. It is hard to explain, but living on the razor’s edge, with one foot in the grave, gives you a rush, just like a junkie gets from drugs. Why do you think people climb cliffs and bungy jump?

I suppose throwing money on a roulette wheel was a fool’s way of getting a small rush. It was a small thrill, but it wasn’t the same. I don’t want to return to the old ways of crime but I must say that dicing with life and death did turn me on.

It is no use denying it, I got turned on living a life that would have frozen most men’s hearts with blind fear.