Chopper Unchopped (31 page)

READ’s spirits improved after the jury in his first trial failed to reach a verdict in August, 1992. But Margaret had returned to the mainland and, while eagerly anticipating the second legal battle for his future, he was back in all-too-familiar surrounds. He could not start another prison ‘war,’ as the other inmates either liked him or were frightened of him. So Read took up what he does second best: writing about crime. For him, it runs close behind the real thing: committing it.

IN the 1970s a young Chinese chap hanged himself in Pentridge. Me and Mad Charlie were standing over some of the inmates in the boys’ yard so we were questioned over it for some reason. Obviously some cynics felt there may have been some foul play. Nonsense, the boy was in a strange country and probably felt homesick.

We were just teenagers at the time but we were moved from the boys’ yard after the suicide and went to the Remand Yard.

It was around that time that a child sex killer was in the jail. He was an animal. The word in the jail was that he had raped and murdered a young girl in a particularly sickening manner. This fellow was on strict protection at the time in an observation cell.

He was taken for a shower once a day and locked back up so that no-one could get to him. Half the jail wanted to kill him and he knew it. Some thought it would only be a matter of time. It is very hard to protect a man 24 hours a day, no matter how hard you try.

The little observation cell the childkiller was in had two doors fitted to the doorway. The main one was solid steel, the second was a steel grill which could be seen through. The main door would be left open so he could get some air, but the second would be locked so that we couldn’t get to him.

We would spit at him and try to hit him with jugs of boiling water, but he was a quick little deviant, so we hardly ever got him. The screws – most of whom were fathers – hated him as much as we did.

Everything comes to those who wait . . . and one thing about jail is that there is plenty of time to wait. One day the grill door was accidentally left open. The prisoner was heard to yell: ‘Sir, Sir, please lock my grill gate, quickly.’ He was in a panic, and no wonder. The screw he wanted must have been on a tea break and obviously couldn’t hear him. Pity.

When the prison officer came back, the inmate in question was hanging by the neck, dead, with piss dripping down his leg from wetting himself.

I think in all the rush we forgot to tell the prison officer that the gate was left open. It didn’t matter. The murderer must have been very depressed and couldn’t live with his foul crime, so he apparently took his own life.

No big deal. But some inmates and staff had the bad taste to suggest that it was a set-up and that someone had let me out of the Remand Yard at the very time the grill was open and that my good self and another had strung the poor soul up.

Naturally I dismiss such stories as foul slander and gossip. Some inmates with too much time on their hands would believe anything they heard.

ONE of my mad mates in Tassie is a bloke I will call the ‘Penguin’, and not because of any similarity to the cute fairy type that toddle up the beach at Phillip Island in front of busloads of Jap tourists. The Penguin is not cute, definitely not a fairy and would bite a Jap on sight if he got half a chance.

The Penguin is a bit of a strange one. Recently, he was charged with some trivial matter like creating a public mischief or some such nonsense. When asked by the beak if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, he said he suffered from a multiple personality disorder and the doctors had told him that he had as many as seven different personalities. The magistrate, who must have been in good humor, replied, ‘multiple personalities: well, I sentence you to seven days jail, but the rest of you can go free’.

It was all very funny in court, but it’s no joke for the poor old Penguin. I have seen him walk up to the bar at a pub and order seven beers: one for him and six for the other blokes living inside his head. It’s not a cheap shout, being a psycho.

The Penguin is ex-army, and has been a fisherman, waterside worker and slaughterman. He is no longer welcome at the Royal Derwent Mental Hospital and he has been in and out of Risdon jail like a yo-yo.

He is a lovable maniac, as a lot of madmen tend to be. He has the reputation as a bad bastard, earning himself a feared reputation as a bar-room brawler who loves blood and guts; in other words, an all round type of fellow and not a bad bloke at all.

And despite his own problems, he finds time to take an interest in social issues and natural justice.

There was a case not so long ago concerning a ‘rock spider’, a child sex offender, who took a nosedive off the Tasman bridge into the drink. It wasn’t the fall that killed him, it was the sudden stop at the bottom.

Now, some unkind people have had the bad manners to suggest that the Penguin put a sawn-off shotgun to the rock spider’s head and gave him the choice of either taking a dive, or having his brains blown out.

The rock spider elected to take the dive.

The Penguin naturally dismisses such statements as foul gossip and rumor.

YES, I am a violent crook and yes, some of my critics at literary lunches have accused me of being a psychopath, but while I am at home with a blowtorch or a sawn-off shotgun, even I have my limits.

I must tell you of a little Maltese chap who rorted the system something fierce. While I was working up an honest sweat torturing drug dealers to make a living, this bloke would sit back getting regular cheques from the government for next to nothing.

Now I was responsible for getting this guy the easy life but what was in it for old Chopper? Not even a thankyou card or a Christmas present.

The man involved was a chap I will call Maltese Joe. He worked in the sheet metal industry but when he didn’t work he was involved in gambling at various card games around Richmond and Prahran.

While he loved to play cards, this bloke obviously wasn’t the full deck himself as on one occasion he attacked me in a hotel in South Yarra with a broken bottle. This was neither healthy nor polite. Luckily I managed to ward off this nutty little Malteser with a pool cue.

He ran off from the hotel threatening me with death, telling everyone he was off home to get a gun.

Maltese Joe’s girlfriend worked at another South Yarra pub and in jest I had said to this woman. ‘Darling, you would have to be the ugliest barmaid I’ve ever seen.’

I was a bit pissed, and I shouldn’t have said it but, dear me, she was a total pig dog. But with certain people of ethnic persuasion, truth is not a defence and the Maltese bloke vowed that no matter how long it would take, he would get me.

Well, I walked into a pub in Windsor and he was standing at the bar, one hand on a beer and the other resting on the bar. He looked quite surprised when I pulled out my trusty meat cleaver and slammed it down on the bar, removing his four fingers at the knuckle. I then walked out.

Eighteen months later I found that Maltese Joe collected a large, five figure workers’ compensation payout and a pension for life for losing his fingers, apparently due to an accident at work on night shift at the factory.

How he worked that one out I’ll never know. I suppose he had the last laugh, and not even a drink in it for old Chop Chop. Even though he was less than generous in sharing his good fortune with me, it would still be wrong for me to put the finger on him. In polite society, it’s simply not done.

IN my first book I explained that I have been in love for years with the most wonderful woman in Australia, the publishing mogul and thinking man’s thex thymbol, Ita Buttrose.

As the world now knows I had the words. ‘I LOVE ITA BUTTROSE’ tattooed on my bum. I had this done as my own personal tribute to a wonderful woman.

It is now criminal folklore that a group of us in H Division in the early 1970s formed the Ita Buttrose fan club, because in those days, the only magazines we were allowed in the lop security area were the
Readers Digest
and
Women’s Weekly .

I have told the story of how a drunken fool, now known as ‘One eyed Pauly’, bad-mouthed Ita in an inner-city pub while I was standing next to him. Needless to say, I could not just stand there and allow the sainted Ita to be defamed in such a foul way without me leaping to her defence.

It was a short but vicious fight which I managed to win. In the book I described how when he was out cold I made sure he lost an eye. But there was more to that fight than you, dear readers, were told. Imagine my surprise when I read the published version of the book to see that I had been cruelly, and in my view unnecessarily, censored from telling the full story. Now all can be revealed.

It seemed that some people thought the true story was a touch distasteful, and should not be told in full. Needless to say I disagree most strongly.

What really happened that day was that there were some very tough men in that pub, many of whom were friends of Pauly. So when I got him on the ground my troubles weren’t necessarily over. I looked at the man on the ground and I looked at the mob around me, and the thought struck me I had better do something to show that his mates should keep out of it, then and forever.

I bent down and, quick as lightning, popped his eye out and dropped it in a glass of beer. I then drank the lot in front of the crowd. Pauly’s mates all went different shades of green but it didn’t seem to worry him, as he was out cold.

I didn’t feel guilty about it, after all Pauly was left with one perfectly good eye, more than enough for him. He was a violent and bloody criminal who had spilt more than his fair share of innocent blood over the years — so please, don’t feel sorry for him.

In fact. I recall the incident with some fondness, because I believe that the swallowing of an eye was a first in the annals of blood and guts brawling in Australia.

Okay, it’s not exactly like climbing Everest, but it is a record of some sort. I remember downing the beer in two gulps. The eye went down like a bantam’s egg. I didn’t blink, and neither did it.

After all, it is quite socially acceptable to have a snack with one’s predinner drinks.

To me violence was an art, and I was the artist.

THIS is a story I was never going to tell. It explains why I have such a deep-seated hatred of the parasites who sell drugs.

The truth is I have a real fear of putting needles in my arm because I myself was the victim of a set up which very nearly killed me. Apart from the time when I was abducted at gunpoint and forced to dig my own grave, and when I had my guts carved open in Pentridge by Jimmy Loughnan, it’s probably the closest I have come to death. And I’ll never forget it . . . or forgive the treacherous vermin that betrayed me.

Years ago, during a very low time in my life at H Division, I was depressed and not in a well state of mind. It was then that I was talked into trying heroin by a few of the boys in the division.

They were all telling me it was great and would help me through my troubles. How was I to know that it was a plot to kill me. They put a full gram of heroin into a spoon, plus some acid out of the H Division fire extinguisher, mixed it up and filled the needle. I held out my arm, and the deadly mixture went into my blood. But, for some unknown reason, I survived. I was big, I was strong and lucky. And I sometimes wonder if Somebody up there was looking after me, because I have had more than my fair share of escapes from death.

Afterwards, they called me ‘Rasputin the mad monk’ behind my back. Mad is right. When I recovered, I was as mad as a cut tiger snake, and I handed out punishment in no uncertain terms. But I was so ashamed of myself for being such a stupid fool that I vowed to punish drug dealers whenever I had the chance. I now distrust and despise drugs and the scum involved.

If I had wished at any time in the last 20 years to go into the heroin trade I could have done so very easily. I know who to call, who to speak to, who to rob and who to kill. I could fly to Melbourne and lay my hands on two to four kilos of Chinese White with little or no fuss. Maybe one or two men shot, but no real damage done. I then could have that bagged up into one ounce lots. I could make a million bucks in a month. And I could kill or cripple anyone who threatened my trade. No-one who knows me doubts that.

If I wanted to go into the amphetamine trade. I could fly to Melbourne and rob a factory with no great trouble. The same with grass. I could march a major grower out to his crop and cut 30 pounds of top head worth about $6000 a pound. I never had the wealth of my enemies, but that was my personal choice. If I wanted to go in that direction I would have made Mr Asia look like a street dealer.

But to be a drug dealer? Where is the honor? Where is the pride? Where is the personal respect? Even a man with no friends and family has to look himself in the mirror. At least I can do that.

I climbed up the blood and guts ladder of the criminal world, by the force of my own hand, not the coward’s way up, using white powder and black money.

I’d hate anyone to think that my problem with drug dealers has ever been jealousy or envy. It’s just that I despise them. They have no right to wealth or power.

SIX-TOES Ray Read, no relation, was not a criminal. But maybe he should have been. He choked to death on his own vomit after a drunken binge and no-one called an ambulance or a doctor as he lay gagging at a party in Albert Park.

Ray Read was the evil genius of the practical joke. He would tell people he was my brother and that I was adopted from a children’s home for the mentally retarded. He told a girlfriend of mine that I had been operated on so that I could not father children because insanity ran in my family.