Chopper Unchopped (47 page)

ON Sunday, December 13, 1992, in the remand yard of Risdon jail, I am delighted to have the pleasure of viewing a spectacle of high comedy. It is the sort of thing which can only happen in jail, and a Tassie jail at that.

There are three Vietnamese in the remand yard. They are pretty rare down here, a little like Tasmanian Aborigines.

Any rate, for the sake of the story, I will call them Huey, Dewey and Louie. They are rice eaters from Western Australia, very quiet, peaceful and polite and no bother at all.

But, in jail, little annoying habits can really grind away, and the rice eaters had one habit which really got up a few noses. Every morning at breakfast they go through each slice of toast, feeling each slice with their fingers, picking out the choicest bits for themselves, leaving the much-mauled remains for the rest of the crew.

This happens for every prisoner, except for me, as I am well versed in the training of small dogs on the outside and Vietnamese and others in the jug. But for a crew of three local boys in remand trying to spread their Vegemite over the top of Asian fingerprints is all too much, and to cut a long story short, there are some heated words over the cold toast.

The three Vietnamese chaps revert to their old stock standard: ‘Me no understand what you say, me no speak English’. A punch is tossed and one of the Aussie boys cops a smack in the mouth.

Bread and butter knives are produced along with verbal abuse and threats flying on both sides of the breakfast table. It certainly wasn’t like this in the Brady Bunch.

Breakfast ends without any further harsh words or actions, but there is bad blood and, patron of the pugilistic arts as I am, I am keenly looking forward to round two.

The three local boys are set on teaching our friends Huey, Dewey and Louie a lesson in manners, Aussie style. Naturally, they plan a sound flogging for them. But they have never tangled with Vietnamese before. And they don’t know that your typical rice eater has no formal grounding in the gentle art of self defence under Marquis of Queensberry rules.

Huey is a tallish, slightly solid fellow, Dewey is an average size, slender chap, and Louie is a Vietnamese version of a Leprechaun, about four foot nothing and about five stone wringing wet.

The three local champions are average size for Aussies, so they have height and strength on their side. These local lads spend the morning trying to gather assorted weapons for the upcoming battle: rubbish bin lids, broom handles and so on. The Viets watch every move they make.

I try to explain, as gently as I can, to the local boys that a sneak attack is the only way to go, but when the shit is about to hit the fan, it is still a case of them turning into schoolboys. The lads stand there yelling things like: ‘Well, go on, do you want to have a go?’ I’m thinking one of them might add any moment: ‘You and me, behind the shelter shed after school, one on one’.

Obviously Huey, Dewey and Louie have done their education elsewhere, because they jump straight in and grab the assorted weapons the Aussies have spent all morning acquiring. The fighting is fast and furious, with flying kicks and Bruce Lee impersonations, and broom handles and rubbish bin lids flying everywhere.

The screaming Vietnamese fight tooth and nail as a team and the local lads are very much taken by surprise at the courage and violence of their opponents.

One local boy ends up on the ground with Dewey, who sinks his teeth into the Aussie’s neck and nose. A flying rubbish bin lid cuts the hand of another local lad. There are punches and kicks all round. The Aussie boys give a good account of themselves, but they are trying to fight fair in the face of total insanity.

Little Louie gets a boot in the mouth and all six cop each other a sound touch up. But in the end the team work, dirty tricks and violence of the Viets beats the strength and guts of the Aussies. It is the first Aussie-Viet battle in Risdon’s history, and it teaches the locals a valuable, if painful lesson. The next time around, it will have to be blood and guts all the way. I am much impressed with the efforts of the Viets. Two of the locals have to go to hospital to get patched and stitched up. All six end up around the corner in N Division, the Punishment Division, with the promise of revenge and the next round to follow.

I’m tipping that next time around the Aussies will win, for they now know it is all the way or not at all when fighting our Asian friends.

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

Anyway, their little altercation was the high point in my time in the remand yard. I thought it was high comedy. A little bit of slapstick humor. Or should that be chopstick humor? Ha, ha.

TASSIE’S Risdon prison isn’t such a bad place, really, in spite of my unkind remarks about it. Alcatraz it ain’t, but there are some pretty solid boys doing time here at the old Pink Palace, as we call it. Shane Hutton, Neville Taylor, Rocky Devine, to name but a few. The Vietnamese Mafia, Huey, Dewey and Louie, have now been convicted and have to do six months for robbing some Chinese people. Whether it is on the mainland or in Tassie, it appears that the Chinese and the Viets just can’t get along. I taught Huey, Dewey and Louie to sing ‘Australia is a wonderful country’, and ‘We love Bruce Ruxton’. Ha, ha.

The screws aren’t a bad lot. There is a relaxed and easygoing attitude that I like. The big boss of the jail, the captain of the good ship Risdon, is Governor George Lawler, a big old boy who looks like he has been fighting all his life. A tough old bugger, but a fair man, he is always telling me to plead guilty. I said to him once: ‘Would you plead guilty if you were in my place?’

‘Certainly not!’ was his reply. Jail governors, no matter what state you are in, are all cut from the same barbed wire fence. You can jump all over them, but they cut the shit out of you if you get caught.

One ray of sunshine here is the female psychologist down at the hospital. Her name is Jo Hunter, and she looks like she belongs in the pages of Penthouse magazine. She is in the right line of work, because watching her walk around the jail is causing mass nervous breakdowns.

In any jail in Australia, you will always find a few characters, and the Pink Palace is no different. There is one bloke here who I will call ‘Double Bunger’ Freddie. His name is Freddie Plumstead and he had a girlfriend with a healthy appetite in matters which normally happen in the bedroom.

Now old Freddie, was nothing if not generous, and when the girlfriend mentioned that she was interested in taking on two men at once, Freddie contacted an escort service and got the services of a local stud for $280. Now the escort was supposed to keep the girlfriend busy at one end while Freddie attacked from behind. But the escort, Jamie, was sadly unable to rise to the occasion, and to top it off, Freddie heard his girlfriend say to the wilting young man: ‘Give me a ring when Fred’s not about’.

Well, Fred spat the dummy, and anything else that was in his mouth at the time, and gun play followed. Fred held the young man at gun point and got his $280 back, and he let a few shots rip as well.

Personally, I thought gun play was over the top. He should have just taken him to the small claims tribunal instead. As for the girl, she sounds like the life of the party.

There are plenty more characters here. The trouble with the jail is that it is built like a toy prison. The Pentridge car park is probably bigger than the whole of Risdon. The boys playing cricket here have to be careful that they don’t hit the ball too hard, in case they hit some passerby walking his dog near the jail.

I am going to fight hard to win all my legal battles, but if it goes against me, I could be in worse places than Risdon.

IN Tassie there are three classes of criminals: white collar, blue collar and no collar. There is no doubt that down here the prince of the white collar crims is the disgraced accountant, Colin Room.

Many professionals who hit a legal hurdle drop their bundles and do their time hard. But not Colin – he even refused parole because he was too busy on the inside with his various jobs. He was writing a history book on Tasmania and involved in the prison debating team.

But in December, 1992, time ran out for Colin. He had served his sentence and he left, swearing on his stockbroker’s wooden leg that he was out of funds and had not been able to squirrel anything away in his days as a bent money man.

I will miss Colin’s cheerful face around the place, as he was a very pleasant chap. He was the master of the flying conversation. You’d see him walking towards you and with a wave and a smile, he would start chatting away with the latest news, information and gossip. The only thing you didn’t get in these snippets was an up-to-date weather forecast and the latest betting on the day’s TAB meeting.

These conversations would begin at about 20 to 25 paces apart and continue until he was about 25 paces past you. He was a fast talker and could jam quite a deal in those 50 steps. Those flying chats always amused me as he never seemed to be able to talk while he was standing still. He liked to talk to people as he rushed around Risdon like an amphetamines freak on roller skates.

He was like a politician – always talking, walking and carrying an armful of papers. In fact, I personally think that Colin should be in Parliament and many politicians should be in Risdon.

In many jails it is said that one or more tough inmates actually run the jail. In Risdon, Colin ran the place, not because he was tough, but because he was an organisational dynamo. Most screws are lazy by nature and Colin took over many major duties that a prisoner should not have been asked, or even allowed, to do.

I quite like this strange little man, with the smile of a Mexican politician and the glib tongue of a used car salesman. During the jail football season, they would video tape the game and Colin would do the commentary. It would then be replayed to the whole jail that night.

It was a major comedy, to hear this upmarket, private school, cultured voice calling a game where players were kicking and punching each other half to death. He may not have been king of the jail, but Colin was the king of comedy.

I wish him well in his future ventures. He is not a bad bloke. Criminally speaking, he is not someone I would put in the boot of a car. You wouldn’t get money out of him with a crowbar.

ON my daily walks to the prison hospital from the remand yard to get my vitamin tablet I found, much to my delight, seven big, fat snails, bloody big buggers. Anyone who has been to jail knows that all prisoners become first class scroungers and learn that anything they can find to use they will grab with both hands.

Now, the sight of seven snails was too great a temptation to me. I scooped the blighters up and asked one of the screws to boil up some water for me. I placed the snails in the water and let them soak for about 10 minutes. I then got some more boiling water and gave them another 10 minutes. That seemed to slow them down, in a manner of speaking. They were easy then to pop out of their shells.

I got hold of some silver paper, some salt, pepper, garlic powder and a spoonful of butter. I didn’t have a French cookbook so I had to do the best I could. In prison, Nouvelle Cuisine is anything cooked by a first-year apprentice cook. I got the recently deceased snails, minus their shells and wrapped them in the silver paper, with the salt, pepper, butter and garlic powder. I placed the lot on the grill under the big toaster in the remand yard dining room. I gave it about 10 minutes, five on each side, then I pulled the parcel out and took them back into the remand yard.

All in all, I must say that they didn’t taste too bad, perhaps a touch oily and chewy. I was particularly proud of the garlic, which gave them that French flavor.

They went down well, so every day I went to the hospital I would keep my eyes out for a few snails. In the end I found the spot. They seemed to have a little patch near the hospital garden where they would gather. I was able to scoop them up, making sure not to grab too many of the little green pellets around them.

I felt I was getting the hang of the French cooking. In fact, with my experience with meat cleavers I thought that when I got out of jail I could go into the culinary business.

I was confident, perhaps too confident, about my cooking skills. The little buggers finally had their revenge. I had plenty of time to think about my mistakes as I was sitting on the toilet. I know about severe stomach pains, having been stabbed in the guts once or twice, and let me tell you, the snails were tougher than a sneak knife attack.

I was shivering and shaking and thought I was at death’s door. I have suffered bad cases of Bombay Bottom, at the hands of Mad Dog’s curried vegies in Pentridge and Slim Minogue’s chilli powder delights, but that pales into nothing compared with the revenge of the killer snails.

It was then I learnt a very important lesson about cooking the more exotic dishes. If one insists on eating garlic snails, one should always know that the snails themselves have not gobbled a gutful of snail bait. The little green pellets turned out to be snail poison and the buggers I had been eating were the gung-ho survivors of more chemicals than Chernobyl.

IN my experience, the best sort of screws in any prison, are the ex-army, navy and airforce blokes. They have been there and done that, and seen it all, and they don’t seem to have anything to prove. It is the same with ex-boxers. They are normally good blokes who don’t get into punch-ons to prove their worth because they have already done that in the ring.

Vietnam vets seem OK, although some can be a little crazy. But in the prison service it seems that the bigger fool you are the higher you go up the tree. There are contradictions to every rule, but generally, what I say is true. The prison service is hardly a vocation. Ask a group of schoolchildren what they want to be when they grow up and not one will say: ‘I want to be a screw and look after tattooed psychopaths in a cold and damp prison’. Face facts, it is not like being a brain surgeon or a jet pilot is it?

Generally speaking I get on well with prison officers, because I am polite and can tell a joke. Screws get bored, like everyone else, and they like a bit of a laugh, but sometimes it is a little like trying to converse with the mentally retarded. Now, don’t get me wrong, I will never be remembered as a genius, but fair dinkum, compared with some of these prison officers, I could have been a Rhodes Scholar. They would have struggled to be road workers.

Crims and screws agree on one thing: that the people who run prisons wouldn’t know if a tram was up them unless you rang the bell.

THERE is a delightful senior Prison Officer here called Dave Oakley. He is a nice bloke, and like many of us he has a paranoid fear and distaste for creepy crawlies such as spiders and snakes and the like. A great deal of tasteless practical jokes have been played on Mr Oakley, involving assorted creepy crawlies, dead and alive. This has filled him with horror, outrage and a fair degree of panic. One day a fellow prison officer found a freshly dead tiger snake and, in the name of good humor, curled it up near the front door of Dave’s car in the prison officers’ car park. Dave was knocking off work and left the prison, only to return minutes later, ashen-faced, and without a word to his colleagues, he went to the prison armory and grabbed a shotgun. He then walked back out of the jail toward the car park, took aim and blew the snake to Kingdom Come. His fellow officers, shocked, but still smiling, said: ‘Dave, it was already dead’.

Mr Oakley, the color returning to his face, turned and said: ‘Well, it’s a damn sight deader now.’ He then picked up his bag and went home. The practical jokes in relation to Mr Oakley and creepy crawlies stopped around the same time that the tiger snake met its second death.

Dave later said that as far as he was concerned there are no such things as empty guns or dead snakes, and personally, I tend to agree. I wouldn’t care if it was a dead snake or a rubber one, I’d shoot it just to be on the safe side.

I was called in recently by one of the top men in the jail and he said that after reading my mail it would appear that I was trying to write some sort of book without permission from the appropriate authorities. I reeled in horror. Perish the thought, an inmate of Her Majesty’s Prison, Risdon, trying to write a book. Outrageous! In reality, I think that they all knew another book was in the wind and they were only flying the flag.

I wonder if they’ll want autographed copies when it comes out?

IT WAS May 13. Fistic combat was in the air. The combatants were Craig ‘Al Plonko’ Ferris, a Sydney crook, doing time for rape, and Kevin ‘The Drunk’ Clarke, doing not a real lot for God knows what. Ferris was in the remand yard on appeal and Clarke was there for reasons that even puzzled him. Al Plonko was a fitness freak, with the fighting ability of a wet soapy sock. Clarkey the drunk had been a handy man with his fists until the grog and ill-health had kidnapped him and took him to the land of the semi-dead. But the old drunk had guts, and was eager to rock and roll, in spite of the fact that Al Plonko was twice his size and in better physical shape.

Let me tell you, this was not a fight that would take top billing in a Don King Production at Caesar’s Palace. It wouldn’t even get a gig on a Bernard King Caesar salad, but on a boring day in Risdon, it pulled a crowd.

Both men took off their shirts and, bare-chested, proceeded to shape up, if that was the word. It reminded me of a schoolboy sparring match between two 10-year-olds. It was a most civilised affair, nifty little jabs and hooks that swept through the air with little danger of hitting any target.

Al Plonko decided to liven the affair by throwing a few kicks out which would have made Sir Robert Helpmann proud. The sparring contest proceeded to get mildly violent as some glancing blows hit the mark on both sides. The close quarters work began, with a few semi-hard punches starting to hit their marks on both men’s heads and faces. Then there was the break as more circling and long range jabs became the order of the moment. I was about to take a nap when suddenly a glancing right hand from Al Plonko caught the drunk on the right side of the jaw. Kevin staggered and started to step backward, then with eyes rolling, he fell backward to the cement, and hit the deck heavily, with the back of his skull smashing in the cement like a sledge hammer. He lifted his head and tried to get up, but his eyes rolled again and his right arm and legs started to shake, rattle and roll. He was having some sort of epileptic fit, accompanied by choking sounds and violent shaking.