Chopper Unchopped (68 page)

The High Court said the principle that the verdict of a jury in a criminal trial should be by the agreement of all jurors dated back to the 14th century and was assumed to be the case when the Constitution was drawn up at the beginning of the century.

Down here in the deep south, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Let’s put it this way: If 12 doctors examined your mother and 10 said she was dead and two said she was very much alive would you accept the majority opinion and ring the undertaker, or sack the lot and get a new medical team? You cannot sign a death certificate under Australian law unless the patient is 100 per cent dead. If any doctor came to you and said: ‘Sorry, but we buried your dear old granny yesterday. The old girl was about 90 percent dead any rate, so bugger it, what’s the difference’, you would not be impressed.

Thank goodness that majority verdicts aren’t used in the public hospital system. If the Tasmanian majority verdict method was used in hospitals, anything worse than a broken leg and we would all be dead as door nails in no time flat.

IT APPEARS that David Porter has only agreed to advise on the case so it may be that the mouth from the south, Michael Hodgeman, may be the man to fly the flag for me in the final hearing. He is a top bloke and although he appears to be a mate of the Buggster, I will not hold that against either of them. After all, it is Tasmania.

Anita tells me that Mr Hodgeman has a brilliant legal mind and backs it up with a heap of dash. He seems to be the man for me in this sort of mess.

I remain convinced that I can win this. I noticed that in dismissing my appeal, Justice Zeeman said that the trial judge had erred in his direction to the jury, yet Justice Zeeman said: ‘I am satisfied that no substantial miscarriage of justice has actually occurred by reason of the misdirection’.

I am left to wonder what level of a miscarriage of justice is considered acceptable. Apparently it has to be a ‘substantial’ miscarriage before it matters.

I hope the High Court will have other ideas.

I know there are people who would be as delighted as a pack of poofters in a Vaseline factory if I shut up and stayed in jail. But I will not be silenced. I remain the greatest living writer with no ears in the world.

Such is life.

IN 1991 investigative journalist John Silvester interviewed Mark Brandon Read in Pentridge prison’s top security H Division for a series of newspaper reports. Over almost three years Read has written more than 1000 letters from both inside and outside jail. These form the basis of Read’s best-selling autobiography
Chopper From The Inside
, its sequel
Hits and Memories
and this book.

Silvester has been a crime reporter since 1978. He rowed at Cambridge (in a hired dinghy) and went to Oxford – on a bus.

Andrew Rule is a retired police reporter and failed amateur jockey who currently produces radio 3AW’s award-winning breakfast programme.

The editors would like to thank Det. Sen. Sergeant R. O. T. Plumber (retired).

Chopper on … the Republic:

‘I suspect it’s a Labor Party plot – a case of no food in the fridge so let’s repaint the house.’

Chopper on … royalty:

‘A few of the younger royals could do with a blindfold and a last cigarette, but the Queen is a lovely old dear.’

IN 1991 investigative journalist John Silvester interviewed Mark Brandon Read in Pentridge prison’s top security H Division for a series of newspaper reports. Over almost three years Read has written more than 1000 letters from both inside and outside jail. These form the basis of Read’s best-selling autobiographies
Chopper From The Inside, Hits and Memories
and
How to Shoot Friends and Influence People
.

Silvester has been a crime reporter since 1978. He is a master of disguises and wears a toupee.

Andrew Rule is a retired police reporter who wanted to be a tent boxer. Both are employed as senior writers for
The Sunday Age
.

The editors wish to thank respected criminologist Professor A. De Bolfo for his inspiration.

MARK Brandon ‘Chopper' Read is a self-confessed killer and standover man who may spend the rest of his life in Tasmania's Risdon Prison for a crime he declares he did not commit. He was sentenced to an indefinite term ‘at the Governor's Pleasure' in 1993 over a shooting near Launceston the previous year.

Read has spent most of his adult life in prisons – including more than ten years in Pentridge's notorious H Division. After his release from Pentridge in 1990 he became a best-selling author, publishing three volumes about his life and crimes.

Read's success sparked outrage, and even threats to legislate to stop criminals from profiting from writing autobiographies. He sought permission from prison authorities to write a fourth book, but it was officially denied. He was further angered when denied permission to marry his fiance, Mary-Ann Hodge. He threatened to take the issue to the United Nations but then decided to revert to type and smuggle out material for the book under the authorities' noses. Chopper Read now faces punishment, including possible solitary confinement, for refusing to buckle to the order to stop writing.

Read says himself: ‘The last bloke who got his jollies burning books was a little Nazi called Adolf, and it didn't get him too far.'

The criminal predator who abducted and tortured drug dealers for a living, maintained he'd retired from crime when he went to Tasmania in 1990. He could have lived a comfortable life with the royalties from his books, but virtually all the money has been spent on a lengthy legal campaign to have him released. But while he has lost his liberty and his money, the irrepressible Read has maintained what he calls his ‘scallywag sense of humor' and his telling observations of an underworld sub-culture that most people never see.

THE Governor called me into his office one fine day and in his best serious voice with his best serious look told me I could no longer write letters to my publishers because it appeared to him I was trying to write another book. The man should have been a rocket scientist.

He handed me back a small pile of mail that I had written and posted off to my publishers over the previous ten days. He was quite friendly and nice about it, but quite firm: I did not have permission to write books.

This was in spite of the fact that I had already written two books while being held in the prison’s remand yard, and neither attacked the jail or breached the security or good management of the prison.

I find it slightly comic that after nearly two years of suspecting that I was smuggling my literary efforts out of the prison it suddenly dawned on the prison hierarchy that my books had been written through the prison mail: one letter at a time, one page at a time, all carefully read, censored, and cleared by prison security.

The Governor told me that if I wished to write a book I must apply in writing to the general manager of the prison and permission might be granted. However, prison security made it quite clear that even if permission was granted that virtually all mail sent out by me aimed toward any future book or literary effort would be deemed to be in ‘bad taste’ or ‘inappropriate’, or morally or politically incorrect. Meaning that any remarks about the prison or its management or matters relating to the police, the courts or the administration of justice in general would be blocked.

That means I would be able to write about recipes, the weather and not much else. So, taking all that into consideration, and bearing in mind that I am no longer in the remand yard and allowed the phone calls and other small freedoms permitted to men held on remand, I was left wondering if it was worthwhile trying to write a fourth book.

I tried to do the right thing, and wrote to the prison general manager and the Governor, but I knew the deck was stacked against me from the start. Even if I got so-called ‘permission’ my letters would be gutted.

Some of my outgoing mail had already been stopped because I had made comic jests and light-hearted remarks that some genius decided came under the heading of ‘sexual innuendo’. Checking the mail for cash and drugs I can understand, but reading every word and making moral judgements on the content is Monty Python madness.

I’ve had dozens upon dozens of letters stopped. Even poetry was not allowed, until wiser heads prevailed at the top. One prisoner even had his incoming mail stopped because it was perfumed, for God’s sake.

Imagine how I felt. After knocking out three national bestsellers under very difficult conditions it would have been just as easy to give the game away. I am amazed that in a so-called democratic country that any citizen, whether a prisoner or not, can effectively be forbidden from writing.

I tried to explain that the whole thing was just too much bloody bother and I was no longer interested. I’ve done three books, and got Governor’s Pleasure for it. If I get another one out, I said, I’ll probably get the chair … and I don’t mean a Chair of Literature at a university.

This mindless hysteria over a fourth book is laughable. It’s not as if anything I’ve got to say relates in any way to the running of the prison. It is a case of prison security and the jail administration going beyond what they are required to do. They have become literary police.

If the authorities tried to stop some government-subsidised, black tee-shirt wearing academic trendy, of questionable sexuality, from writing some boring 60-page book about the mating habits of Tibetan yaks, the civil libertarians would be protesting in the streets.

But because the author is a Good Ol’ Boy with no ears, who is popular with the book-buying public, and therefore not seen as trendy, then no-one has lifted a finger.

It appears that the principle of freedom of speech upheld in the constitution and law of every truly democratic country, falls short south of Bass Strait. At least, in the case of Mark Brandon Read it does.

I see this as a blatant attempt to gag me. I suspect it is a breach of the United Nations Charter on the humane containment of prisoners, and I know Amnesty International has strong views on freedom of speech and censorship. Didn’t the Russians use to pull similar stunts with their wayward writers? I may not be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but even if I am only a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic ratbag, bar-room story teller and dunny wall poet, so were Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson.

I want to continue being a tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, ratbag story teller and dunny wall poet, and I shouldn’t have to ask permission to continue and I should not be the victim of censorship. I would be the only Australian author ever to have these third world, Iron Curtain restrictions imposed on him.

In Australia it is considered perfectly wonderful to talk at length about what you would like to do, and providing you never do it no man will raise his voice against you. But if you get off your arse and get out there and actually do it the critics will knock you.

Criminals are told to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and improve themselves. But the very, very few who have tried to do just that are widely condemned.

No-one ever dreamed of declaring the money earned from writing a book to be classed as the ‘profits of crime’ until I came along. But when the politicians saw that a crook could not only write books but national bestsellers that appealed to the common man, a law was created to try to stop me.

Do the brain-dead politicians think that I would grab a drug dealer, and then shorten his shoe size because I thought that one day it may make a slightly amusing anecdote in a book? I have just tried to tell my life story, warts and all, and if I make an honest dollar along the way, so what? Now they are even trying to stop that.

Criminals are told to mend their ways and improve themselves, but when we do, the rules get changed. The people who run the game not only have the umpires in their pocket, but they move the bloody goal posts halfway through the match. How can you win?

Sometimes while writing this I have been at the end of my tether and tempted to quit … but then I’d think about the small army of friends and loved ones who are with me in their hearts and minds. And that’s when I decided it would be more fun to sneak the letters out, just to shove it up the authorities.

You’re holding the result in your hand. Please pay at the counter.