Chopper Unchopped (56 page)

I have always found these secret hush hush police from the various internal investigation units given to unhealthy paranoia and suspicion, and they all seem to believe in conspiracy theories. This is a wonderful weapon to use against the police themselves, as they are believers in the unbelievable.

The National Crime Authority boys were among the most highly strung group of ultra-paranoid police I’ve ever dealt with. You could wind them up like robot puppets. They were so paranoid they would speak in whispers while checking the ceiling, walls, floor, table and chairs for hidden listening devices. What a comedy.

I have written before about a federal policeman turned NCA cop called Cedric Netto. He is a serious, no-nonsense honest cop given to just a touch of classic NCA paranoia. Now he is back in the feds and would be one of the most cunning and dangerously honest bastards I’ve seen in the job. He is a classic example of the mentality and thinking pattern of the people in the internal investigating units within the various police forces, state and federal. Which means I shouldn’t have been surprised when, one day in November 1992, the Governor of Risdon called me to his office and asked if I would be willing to talk to a federal policeman who wanted to interview me about my ‘involvement and relationship with Cedric Netto’.

‘What involvement?’ I asked. ‘Who is this bloke?’ I was told he was from the federal police’s internal investigations. What a bloody joke. The poor bloody Launceston CIB found the name ‘Cedric Netto’ and a phone number (clearly marked ‘federal police’!) in my address book, and jumped to the conclusion that Netto was on Captain Chopper’s pay roll.

The fact is I’ve seen Netto about half a dozen times in my life. He has questioned me about various matters, but mostly relating to the late private investigator Tom ‘Hopalong’ Ericksen. Netto came out to Pentridge a few times because my name had been tossed up in the ruck in matters he was investigating. As I’ve said before, he would be the most painfully honest bastard I’d ever met from the federal police or any other police force.

The fact is that whenever I have spoken to Netto I have always been left wondering what it was all about. NCA police leave you thinking: ‘What the hell was that all about?’, as they tend not to come to any direct point, but verbally dance around a conversation while looking at the roof and walls for concealed devices, of course. Ha ha. I guess it’s a case of if you know Chopper Read you must either be totally corrupt or crazy. Well, Netto is not corrupt. And I am no bloody psychiatrist, so I can’t give any sort of opinion as to his mental health.

I had the names of roughly 25 Victorian, Tasmanian and federal police in my address book, also roughly 80 rego numbers taken from unmarked police cars. But Netto’s name was the only one clearly marked ‘federal police’, hence the big investigation. I’d find it comical, except for the fact these internal police investigators have no sense of humor.

THE psychiatrist and psychologist are God’s gift to the mentally ill, proving that God does have a sense of humor. Yet again I have been interviewed by yet another psychiatrist, who is quite a nice fellow in himself, not at all like some of the other head-banging, barking mental cases I have seen masquerading as doctors. The psychologist here is a horny-looking honey who obviously can’t read minds, because if she could she would put her hands over her arse and run screaming from her office. And the other psychiatrist is a rather friendly fellow and not a bad chap. I was quite taken aback to meet three normal members of the psychiatric profession — psychiatrists being the natural enemy of the psychopath.

Dr Alan Bartholomew, the Pentridge head shrink, once said to me: ‘Chopper, you’re not mad. You’re just a bad bastard’. So much for medical opinion. What more can I say?

OVER the years my never-ending dramas and adventures have taken their toll on my old Dad’s mental well-being and he is no longer the same man he once was. He was always a touch on the aggro and paranoid side, but his paranoia has reached the stage where the old bloke has now totally lost the plot.

During my second trial he wrote to me telling me he had a strong suspicion that Trent Anthony could be a police spy. Considering that Trent was going Crown witness against me one would hardly need to be a rocket scientist to have a faint sneaking suspicion about him. But when Dad wrote to me telling me he believed my legal problems were a ‘Catholic conspiracy’ against me I knew that he had well and truly lost track, bless his heart. And when he heard that our old mate Billy ‘the Texan’ Longley was taking Margaret ballroom dancing he wrote to me wondering if Billy was trying to back door me.

He’s a great one for writing letters, is Dad. He wrote to the ‘Grand Inspector General of the Supreme Council of the Masonic Lodge’ at 10 Duke Street, St James, London, and alerted them to the plight – ha ha, oh my good God – of my good self. Then he contacted the tax department demanding they investigate the financial affairs of not only Trent Anthony and Sid Collins, but the police who arrested me.

Naturally Dad also whizzed off a quick letter to Bruce Ruxton, the Prime Minister and the Tasmanian Premier. He is in constant touch with a crew of World War 2 army veterans, Masonic Lodge, Orange Lodge, and a regular crew of old Right-wing nutters. They also whizz off stern letters to God only knows who re the sorry plight of my good self. Dad feels that Sid Collins could have been involved in drugs, so a stiff letter to the NCA, DEA and American FBI was sent post haste.

He once wrote a letter to the health department because he thought the police station smelled. But I love my old Dad. He means well. He sits in his home unit with his guns and thinks about my situation and all the people out to get me, and it sends him around the twist. To him, his son is always in the right.

I’ve gone up to my Dad years ago and said: ‘Dad, I had to shoot some bastard tonight’. He’d say: ‘Who was that, son?’ and I’d say: ‘Some wog’. He’d say: ‘Ahh, he’d be a bloody Catholic. Was he a drug dealer?’ I’d say: ‘Yes’ and he’d ask: ‘Did you put one in the head, son?’ If I said no, he’d say: ‘You should have killed the bastard, son. Your kind heart will be the death of you’.

Half the time I’d only be teasing him. I could kill 1000 men in front of 1000 witnesses and Dad would swear I didn’t do it. He’s a wonderful old bloke, but it’s all been too much for him, I’m afraid.

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 parlors 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.

The children of this nation are dying at a faster rate than the bloody trees. Wake up before it is too late.

PROSTITUTES will always be part of the criminal world because they will never be accepted by the people in mainstream society on moral grounds. Legalise the game, call the girls ‘sex workers’ or whatever you like, but it makes no real difference to what happens on the street and in the parlors. The girls themselves still belong to the underworld.

At best, prostitutes live in a sort of limbo between the legal and the illegal, between night and day and between the criminal world and the normal world. At worst, they’re headed for the gutter and an early grave. They are the queens of false pretence — professional pretenders with bedrooms for a stage and their clients for an audience paying for each performance.

They can seem fascinating, exotic creatures but my advice is: Don’t ever fall in love with one. Lust, yes. Love, never. If you do make the mistake of falling for a pro, stab yourself in the back straight away and get it over with. Because, believe me, if you don’t, then little Miss Tragic Magic will do it for you. And I’ve seen enough goings on inside and outside massage parlors to know what I’m talking about …

POLISH Suzie went to the same Seventh Day Adventist church as I did, and later we went to the same church school – one of the many I attended. Suzie used to get called ‘God’s little virgin’ by a lot of the other boys. She was so prim and proper and very God-fearing and religious, blushing crimson at the faintest hint of a swear word or a rude joke.

While other girls tried to hike their school uniforms up to turn them into mini-skirts Polish Suzie would wear hers six to eight inches below the knee. She was blue-eyed, peaches-and-cream and oh, so very innocent. Most Seventh Day Adventist girls were on the prim and proper side but little Suzie made the others look almost sinful. Even talking to the boys was a no-no … a polite hello with eyes looking towards the ground was all we could get out of her.

Later, in her teenage years, after we had both left school, I would sometimes bump into Suzie. She was more talkative but still a real bible basher — and she saw me as a truly evil sinner, because I had left the church. She would always tell me: ‘I will pray for you, Mark. God loves you’. And off she would go. At 16 years of age she was a tall, well-built girl but she would dress in shoes and socks and long skirts and shirts with buttons all done up. She dressed to make herself look as plain and as unattractive as she could. But you couldn’t help noticing that for a bible-basher she was built in a very wicked, wicked way. In fact, downright sinful. But she didn’t act sinful. We were the same age, but she would talk down to me as if I was a naughty little boy and she had Jesus sitting on her shoulder at all times. I always felt guilty whenever I saw her.

A month after I turned 19 in November, 1973, I ran into Suzie again. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but she bounced up to me full of life to show me her engagement ring. She was dressed in a more ‘show off the goodies’ manner. She was big and tall and glamorous but still with the innocent face. She told me she was going to marry a sailor — and he wasn’t a Seventh Day Adventist, which was a shock. Suzie was in love, and it had changed her for the better, I thought at the time. She was happy and excited, and as we parted after our short accidental meeting she gave me a quick peck on the cheek. This was most unlike the old Suzie. And there was not a single mention of God, either.

Anyway, about four years later, in 1977, about three months before I got out of H Division in Pentridge, I was in my cell when I was handed a letter. It was from Suzie, telling me she had left her husband and had heard I was in jail. When I got out, she wanted me to ring her at her work at night, as she worked night shifts. She enclosed the phone number and signed off: ‘Lots of love and kisses’.

‘Lots of love and kisses,’ I thought. ‘She has changed’. So when I got out I rang the number and got put onto a chick called Rosie who told me it was a gentlemen’s health club and spa. I forget the name of the place now, but it doesn’t matter. It took a second for the penny to drop, then I woke up. It was a massage parlor. I asked for Suzie to come to the phone but they said: ‘Suzie is with a client’. I was given the address, so I went over and went in. Suzie was in the lounge, having finished with her client. ‘Chopper,’ she yelled. It was the first time she had used my nickname. I looked at her, and could hardly believe the transformation. God’s little virgin had turned into God’s great big bloody whore – and proud of it, to boot.

I asked her ‘what’ and ‘why’. She told me that when she lost her cherry she went mad. She wouldn’t go into the details of the deep, dark reason for her change of ways. But she took me up into a private room and said: ‘Chopper, in the past 12 months I’ve given more head jobs than a brain surgeon’ and laughed at her own joke. I won’t go into any details about what happened next, but believe me, God’s little virgin had changed her ways indeed.

I went back two, three or four times a week to say hello. Suzie wanted to put me on a sling to look after her, but seeing as she always treated me with Christian kindness whenever she saw me I said ‘no’. Taking money from girls has never been my go. Brothel-owners I don’t mind donating to the Chopper Read fund, but not the girls. It never seemed the Aussie thing to do …

Time flies when you’re having fun, even if most of it is in Pentridge. I didn’t see Polish Suzie again until 1987. By this time she was a big-built woman with a large set of Polish watermelons, and she was big in other ways as well. She now owned and ran her own parlor, and had 21 girls working for her seven days and nights a week, in shifts.

Suzie was now worth a mint. She was married to a Polish Jew who knew a lot about real estate and she owned property all over St Kilda, Elwood and Caulfield. At five foot ten tall and 14 stone there was plenty of her, and she had plenty of money, so I let her give me a small but regular cash sling of $250 a week. That mightn’t sound much, but it was a sling – and regular slings from regular places add up. Of course, it was small change to Suzie, but she insisted that I plonk her as well, just for old time’s sake. She must have been happy with the service because soon I was on $500 a week – plus Suzie. She could put her own hand inside her mouth – a trick I’d seen before, but only the best could do it.

So there it is. My shy little schoolmate had become a parlor queen. She has two daughters, both going to a good church school. These days she still owns the parlor, but now she has a manageress running the place. She wasn’t the first Jesus freak I’d seen having the Devil humped out of her in massage parlors — but she was the only one I’d gone to church with. She would have plenty to put in the collection plate these days. She’s richer than most of the so-called rich crooks - pulling in easy $15,000 to $17,000 a week. That takes her out of the basic prostitute league, and makes her a wealthy business woman.

Polish Suzie is one cracker I’ll never forget. She once said to me: ‘The cops will never pinch a girl who swallows the evidence’. She was a real wisecrack, if ever there was one.

NOW that Margaret and I are no longer together, I can tell a few more stories that would have got me shot before. Previously, I have always maintained that I have never partaken of the sexual delights of either Asian ladies or dark-skinned maidens. My dear old Dad would never have approved and, more importantly for my health, Margaret would have considered ways of disposing of my body had she suspected such goings-on. Also, my old ‘mates’ in the Pentridge chapter of the Ku Klux Klan would have teased me without mercy, and I’m the sensitive sort who doesn’t like being made the butt of coarse humor. It makes me cross, and that leads to trouble. But, while on the subject of the ‘White is Right’ types and Right-wing thinkers in general, very few of them haven’t ‘banged a monkey’ at some stage. Or at least considered it with lustful intention. Men are all sexual hypocrites, and I am no exception, except that I admit it. Which brings me to the point …

Polish Suzie had a half-Chinese, half-Indian girl working for her named May. May what or who, I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be her real name anyway. She was a real, brown-skinned beauty – sort of on the buxom side, but graceful. A glamor girl with long black silky hair that flowed down to her arse … and this dark Chinese face that had porno written all over it. And what an actress. She would go into passionate fits of female pleasure before you even got your pants off. A lot of guys fell in love with May, but you can bet Paris to a French letter she wasn’t in love with any of them. May, in fact, according to Suzie was by nature a fish eater, not a meat eater. In other words, she loved girls. The boys were her work, but the ‘ladies’ were her passion. All of which made me feel a bit foolish, as May had me conned nicely.

May had one small worry – her girlfriend. This was a chick from Bangkok who, in the looks department, made May look downright average. The bombshell from Bangkok was a former bar girl and dancer and whore who married an Aussie, came to Australia, and was promptly put to work in a parlor by her loving husband. This meant she made even less money in Australia than she had in bloody Bangkok because dear hubbie got it all, as he was a partner in the parlor with a well-known Melbourne crim and hoon. May worked at the same parlor, and that was how she came to fall for the Bangkok beauty, whose name was Tina. They ran away together, and Polish Suzie rescued them. They both went to work for Suzie – earning about $2000 a week each, with another grand apiece going to Suzie. That’s $3000 a week each all up. That’s earning power. At $180 an hour, you figure it out.

But Tina and May had a problem. Tina’s ex-hubbie wanted her back … and he really wanted to hurt May. He threatened Polish Suzie with a razor blade across the face, which is where I come into the story. Polish Suzie, May and little Tina sat in Suzie’s lounge room and told me the whole sad tale. I didn’t know the husband, but I did know the peanut, two-bob gangster he was in partnership with in the poxy little parlor they owned in Richmond.

The three ladies were all in tears and quite frightened and really needed my help. I was offered money but, like a gentleman, I declined because I already knew what I wanted. Ha ha. So I agreed to help these damsels in distress. They over-dramatised the whole thing. The husband and the two-bob gangster he was teamed up with took about 45 minutes to find and they didn’t even try to fight back. They both got pistol-whipped inside their own parlor in Richmond. I even took the husband back in his car to Suzie’s parlor and marched him inside and gave him an extra flogging in front of Tina, May and Polish Suzie, with a warning that if any of the three ladies in question contacted me again in relation to him or any of his tough mates, then I would pull out both his eyes and eat them. I then let him go, and he went very quietly. People get very attached to their eyes.

The girls were impressed, to say the least. And as far as May and Tina were concerned, they couldn’t do enough to thank me. If you haven’t had a doubleheaded lollipop you haven’t lived. May and Tina were a pair of beautiful dirty girls and in 1987, after more than nine years in jail, believe me, I was in no condition to be taking a high moral tone because I had a girlfriend. May and Tina could have got the Pope to surrender without a protest.

And they all lived happily ever after. At least, until Bangkok Tina ran away from May with a drug dealer on a trip to Amsterdam. The dealer returned without her, so I guess it’s safe to say Bangkok Tina could be sitting in a window somewhere in Amsterdam. She was a wanton slut, but I’ll never forget her. Bless her evil heart.

THERE was this Dutch cracker named Shelley who had once worked in Amsterdam. In Melbourne she didn’t work for Polish Suzie, but for another brothel owner in St Kilda. Shelley had a clean and healthy-looking body and fresh-faced looks, but she carried some sort of hepatitis in her blood. So she was a carrier of a deadly disease — and a sexual seductress of the highest order. She would tease them and then please them. Her looks and her hot body drove the mugs mad.

The joke was that whenever the police came into this parlor the boss would always see to it that Shelley took care of them. Which must have been interesting for the policemen’s wives because, medically speaking, Shelley was a one-woman plague. I’m glad I never touched her. I’m told she is now HIV-positive … and still working, last I heard. Quite scary.

ON SUNDAY afternoons at a certain hotel in Launceston they put on major cultural events in the beer garden for the more sensitive and artistic souls among the pub clientele. I always considered these events a cultural must. Mainland and local strippers would do their best (and worst) and not a bad afternoon would be had by all. Of particular interest to the patrons was the jelly wrestling and the baby oil wrestling between buxom young ladies wearing G-string bikinis. This would get very heated, with bikini tops being torn off, and the slip, slap and sliding was fast and furious. The young ladies in question — all being dancers and models, of course — looked fantastic, dripping with baby oil in the sunshine.

Ah, yes, there was plenty to see and do in Launceston. The Satan’s Riders motorcycle club imported mainland strippers to put on hot and heated strip shows at their club house, which made the Crown Hotel beer garden affairs look tame. Another popular local pastime among certain sections of Tasmanian society was the ‘toss up’. A barrel and barbecue would be put on, attended by a drunken collection of about 20 to 40 louts, crooks and bikies and hillbilly rednecks – and two or three young ladies willing and eager to make friends in a hurry. Hobart might have a university, but there’s no doubt Launceston is the cultural hub of Tasmania.

ANYBODY who read my first book would remember the name Tracy Warren … my secret agent in the Dennis Allen camp. She nearly drove Dennis mad by passing on inside information to me. Tracy was always loving and blood loyal. She would do anything for me and proved that over and over again in actions that could have got her killed.