Chopper Unchopped (49 page)

I MET Billie in a country pub in Tasmania, on the coast. She was a big chick, well built and with a top suntan. In Tassie, they don’t worry about skin cancer – they think UV rays is a new Space Invader game.

When I walked into the pub, Billie was wearing a pair of lady’s running shorts which must have belonged to her baby sister – and they must have shrunk in the wash – a pair of thongs, a tee shirt, and a very bold smile.

This was not in the formal dining room, you must understand.

Billie was full of laughs and jokes and then she challenged me to a game of pool. She said: ‘Do you want a bet?’ I said okay and she nominated $50 a game. I put my $50 down and said: ‘Where’s your cash?’ She said she didn’t have the money but suggested that if she won, she would get the cash, and if I won, I got to get inside her running shorts, if you get my drift.

This was the strangest bet I had been involved in, if you leave out playing Russian Roulette with Vietnamese in Footscray. I asked her if she was serious, and she dropped her pants and poked her bottom in my direction and said: ‘Check that out.’

I did, and decided immediately to accept the wager.

We began to play. Never in my life had I wanted to win a game of pub pool as much as that afternoon. We played and we drank all afternoon. She beat me six out of six games. It cost me $300 and a headache. I vowed never to play her again. She was good looking and cheeky, but too good for me. I gave up and went to the bar. I said to the laughing locals: ‘Why don’t you play her’? They told me they all had and that no-one had beaten her since she was 12.

The only way she could get a game these days was to offer the sexy side wager, and as far as anyone knew, she had never needed to pay up. She only played passing strangers because the locals knew they didn’t have a hope against her. She could make between $200 and $500 a week, depending on how many mugs she could stooge.

The less she wore, the longer mugs like me would stand there, losing game after game, hoping to get her pants down. She told me that winter is the worst: ‘When you’re all rugged up, the boys lose interest’.

Billie was built like an Amazon princess and she was only 16 years old. What really made me worry was that I found out her dad owned the pub and was standing behind the bar.

I had the feeling that if I’d fluked winning a game, I would have had to shoot my way out of town.

Tony Franzone was shot six times, twice in the back of the head, in a professional hit outside his home in the Melbourne suburb of Mt Waverley in May, 1992. Franzone was with his de facto wife and was about to take his 11-week-old son from the back of his car when he was ambushed. He was a heavy gambler who enjoyed the company of gangsters.

‘TOUGH TONY’ Franzone wasn’t tough at all. In fact, he was as weak as piss, and everybody who knew him knew it — hence the nickname. But Tony did play a small role in organised illegal gambling in both Carlton and Fitzroy. I guess he could be called part of the Carlton Crew, the gang of would-be Mafia types who made their money out of illegal gambling and drugs. Tony liked to give people the impression he was connected with the right people. He thought he was a real mob guy, just like in the movies.

I was introduced to him in Carlton and he squeezed a $100 note into my hand as if he was tipping a waiter. He was a two-bob millionaire and a real would-be gangster. He was basically harmless, and seen as a likeable joke. When people would say: ‘Here comes Tough Tony’, the trouble was that poor old Tony didn’t see that it was a joke. He started to believe he was a tough guy. He owed money and believed that his reputation and name would cover his bad debts. But he just didn’t have a reputation, except in his own imagination.

The poor stupid bastard thought that real life was like the movies and he was the star who never got shot. I used to have chicks drop his name to me, as a means of impressing me that they knew some heavy people. I mean, this poor slob had a lot of people convinced he was some sort of Mafia tough guy. He told a couple of people in a nightclub one night that Chopper was a ‘stone killer’ and that ‘we are gunna have ta whack that guy’.

His mouth and his imagination were his worst two enemies. He ran a few illegal card games and a few clubs, or so he claimed. He struck me as a bloke who couldn’t run a stocking. He gambled and got into big debt with some of the main figures in the Italian gambling world. For them, violence is a way of life, not something from the movies.

He thought he could bullshit his way out of anything. He was a dead man, even when I met him years ago. He had big debts and there were people who were looking to collect. He was living on his wits and his mouth even then. He was a loser and it was always just a matter of time.

I used to bump into him at the Chevron nightclub. He always had a few chicks with him, paid by the hour to impress his mates. In the company of the big boys he was just a hanger on.

Whenever he saw me he would try to give the impression that he was a great personal friend. He’d shout me drinks and sling me money, and introduce me to whichever girl or girls he had with him on the night. If I wanted to blow my nose on his shirt he would have paid for the privilege. The guy was a suckhole.

Poor old ‘Tough Tony’. Sooner or later, when you play gangster, you’ll be called upon to back it up. He got blown away in May, 1992, to make an example for other people who didn’t pay their debts. And because he was a pest, simple as that.

Arthur Stanley Smith was one of Sydney’s most feared gangsters. He was involved in murders, heroin distribution, prostitution and police corruption. He was given the green light by corrupt police to commit armed robberies and virtually any crimes he wanted in the 1970s and 1980s. He is now serving life for murder and has become an Independent Commission Against Corruption protected witness. Smith’s autobiography, ‘Neddy, The Life and Times of Arthur Stanley Smith’, was published in mid-1993.

I WAS amused to see that Neddy Smith, one of Sydney’s better known criminal identities, was going to give evidence to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption about his involvement with a host of Sydney police. He has told the ICAC about his various Alice in Wonderland adventures with the NSW boys in blue.

I don’t know why Sydney crooks don’t stick to what they know best, pimping for whores and selling drugs to kids. Every time you see a Sydney crook on television, he is either lying in the street after being killed by an imported Melbourne hitman, or giving Crown evidence against some poor bastard.

The biggest and most feared underworld killer Sydney ever saw was Chris Flannery, and he was from Melbourne, and an idiot at that. Neddy, bless his heart, is also trying to jump on that boring old bandwagon, claiming to know who killed Flannery and why.

Flannery was put off by a Melbourne hitman. I know the bloke who did it, how he got rid of the mortal remains and the reason for the killing.

I can tell you the Melbourne gentleman I am referring to roars with laughter every time he hears one of these razzle dazzle Sydney boys taking the bows or dropping hints over Flannery.

Neddy should kick a few goals by talking to the ICAC. Hush hush secret talks behind closed doors — they’ll all love it. Sometimes it is a case of the paranoid talking to the mentally ill. Neddy has been good for a giggle for many years and he is not letting us down now. Sydney crooks watch too much television.

ANOTHER mate of mine here at Risdon is Shane Hutton. His younger brother Andy used to knock about with me and the boys on the outside, and sometimes go shooting with us, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere.

Andy was a sight – drunk, with a loaded semi-automatic high-powered rifle – a sight I wish I had never seen. Andy had a plate in his head, metal that is, not the dinner variety. He would blast away with scant regard for life and limb, sending the rest of us diving to the dirt to avoid the worst massacre ever seen in Tassie. How he didn’t kill all of us, and why I didn’t put a big dent in his plate, I will never know.

Anyway, Andy’s big brother Shane has become a good mate on the inside. He is a top bloke with a friendly smile and a warm personality. He is a solid bloke, a hard man with a good heart. He is doing life for double murder. He isn’t a bad man, just a good bloke who had a bad day.

Shane has shown me great kindness since I was dumped in here. He is a good style of chap all round and one to have on your side if things turn nasty. He is a gentleman from the old school who understands that it is poor form to give someone up in the police station. These days when you meet a solid bloke, you should write down his name, as they are a dying race of men. In fact, the good blokes’ club is the smallest club in the world.

ONE of the most colorful characters here at the Pink Palace is Robert ‘Rocky’ Devine. Tassie is split into two halves, the north and the south, and they are like separate camps. While Mad Micky Marlow is the most colorful character and best known alleged crook in the north of the state, Rocky is the best known in the south. God knows what would happen if they got together.

Rocky thinks it is the height of bad manners to give anyone up at any time. I found him to be a good style of bloke. He is a top footballer and coaches the jail team. The games are replayed over the jail video. While my little mate Neville Taylor is the goal kicking star, Rocky leads the charge. The games are a mixture of high comedy, Aussie Rules and punch ups, which makes the replays absolute must viewing.

While Mad Mick has falsely been accused of being a safe cracker, a slanderous statement if I have ever heard one, Rocky is thought to be a bank robber. Another tall story, no doubt. Rocky is a big, mean-looking bugger, with as many tattoos as me but less hair. And he has ears, which puts him in front of me in that regard, a point he was quick to point out when I mentioned his thinning hair line.

The solid men of Risdon have as much dash and guts as crims that I have met anywhere, but the dogs in the place are as low as anything I have ever seen. When I first came to the Pink Palace, I thought the place was a joke, but it has grown on me. I would just prefer that I wasn’t here, that’s all. But as old Ned once said: ‘Such is life’. Ned Kelly, that is, not Smith.

Raymond John Denning was one of the most notorious criminals in Australia, a NSW prison escapee who became a folk hero for his attempts to expose flaws in the prison system. Songs were written about him before he was arrested by police in 1988. He turned police informer and died after he was thrown out of the witness protection scheme in 1993. Mystery still surrounds his death. Some people say he was killed; others say it was natural causes. Read couldn’t care less.

I WAS much pleased to hear of the death of Ray Denning. The witness protection program and 30 pieces of silver didn’t do him much good in the end.

‘Denning was a good bloke’ … ‘Ray Denning is as solid as a rock. He is one bloke you can trust’… if I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times, and every clown thought it was true. Denning spent his whole adult life riding high in the criminal world and the NSW prison system. He rode a wave of overwhelming popularity. He was a legend, his name was part of criminal folklore. My mate Mad Dog put his neck on the chopping block for Denning because a thousand old-time solid crooks from one end of the nation to the other swore that Ray was a good bloke.

The Sydney underworld held Denning up as their prime example of a real hard man. A staunch, solid crook who wouldn’t give an inch and who would never talk in a police station. He was loved and respected. Crims are like any other group around the place – they love to look up to someone, to have idols. And to many crims, particularly in Sydney, Denning was an idol.

But in the end, when Denning faced real pressure, he folded. He rolled over and did whatever the police and the Crown Law Department wanted done. After a lifetime of standing in the sunshine with a thousand men patting him on the back, he found himself standing alone in the cold, with no place to run and no place to hide. Like so many others, he simply crumbled, shrivelled up to the nothing he really was all the time. These fairweather gangsters turn dog as soon as the sun goes in behind a cloud.

As that old bloke in Dad’s Army used to say: ‘They don’t like it up ’em’. Ha ha.

The more popular a man is, the less I trust him. The more friends a man has, the more questions I ask about him. I am still trying to find out if Sydney has ever produced a famous crim, with the exception of Mad Dog.

Ray Denning should be a lesson to us all. The next time we hear someone say: ‘Yeah, he’s a good bloke, you can trust him’, just remember Denning. As far as Sydney is concerned, Ray Denning was about the best their excuse for an underworld could produce. You’d get more support from an underwire bra than the underworld up there.

I’d rather be backed up by one hated arsehole who can stick fat than a hundred popular showponies 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.

WHEN I was first put into the mental hospital in Melbourne by my mother, it was a horrifying experience. I was in a lock-up security ward and life was not nice. Plenty of pills and needles to try and keep you under control. The male nurses looked more like nightclub bouncers than sisters of charity.

In the 1970s, the mental hospitals around Australia made our jails look tame; violence was part of the treatment. There were 20-stone male nurses dressed in white except for their black boots. They handled the mentally ill with great care and compassion, and a boot in the head, followed by a needle in the arse. If you so much as farted out of place, you would be whacked out with medication.