Chopper Unchopped (73 page)

I was mucking about with Bucky one day and he ripped a short sharp left upper cut into my ribs. Now when I laugh or cough I get a pain in my left side. I think the little pipsqueak broke one of my ribs. I think I’ll have to put some butter on him and stuff him in the toaster. He is a strong little monkey, half my size and twice my strength. Never fear, I’m plotting revenge of high comedy.

I RECEIVED a letter from a young mate of mine in Pentridge, David ‘Macca’ McPherson, who wrote to tell me that an old enemy of mine, named Richard Victor Maladnich, spoke to the
Truth
newspaper a short while ago and called me unkind names.

Poor Richard. The last time I saw him was in H Division, Pentridge. He had fallen over and hit his head rather savagely on a sharp heavy instrument and was pissing blood at a fast and furious rate of knots.

I don’t know if it was an accident or if poor Richard was the victim of terrible foul play. Nevertheless, Richard is not a man who tells on people in police stations, so if he was attacked his attacker went unpunished. Richard has had a long running battle with the needle and his personality has taken a dive as a result.

For the life of me I don’t understand why he dislikes me so much. That accidental tap on the skull must have affected his state of mind and I am shocked and somewhat hurt that he could express any sort of ill will toward me.

I will mention the dear boy in my prayers. Ha ha.

WHENEVER I’ve appeared in court in Tassie in the past, big Bill Watson has always been in attendance. He is a big 20-stone scallywag who has been a true and loyal friend to me. Whenever I walked into the courtroom there was Big Bill smiling at me. But when I went to court for the appeal against this sentence, I noticed that the big fella was nowhere to be seen. I asked Anita Betts and my barrister, Michael Hodgman QC, if they had seen my old mate, and this is the story I got. It seems that Big Billy showed up wearing a bandana tied around his head like some half-crazy pirate of old, and they both asked him not to come into the courtroom as his appearance in court might upset their honors.

They told him that I asked for him not to come in because I knew he wouldn’t do anything to hurt my appeal, and he waited outside the courthouse. Of course, I gave no such instructions to either Anita Betts or Michael Hodgman. They told me about it after the event. I told them I agreed with them but I thought it was the height of petty-mindedness. Nevertheless, they are my lawyers, and I pay them every dollar I have to be petty-minded in my interests. That’s why they’ve got Mercedes Benzs and I’m in jail.

Now I am told that my dear old friend Big Bill ‘has cancer’ and is losing his hair due to the medical treatment he is receiving, hence the bandana. Anita knew this before the court appearance but did not tell me until later.

It is a small thing and Big Bill didn’t mind and Anita didn’t want to upset me, but to think that my old mate, who could be dying of bloody cancer, was told by my own lawyers not to come inside and so went out and sat on the steps waiting to hear the result, makes me a bit sad. He was told that Chopper didn’t want him to come in, and that breaks my heart, or what’s left of it.

I can be accused of many things, but letting a mate down is not one of them. Who gives a flying shit about the judges not liking the wild look of my bandana-wearing friend. Bloody hell, Anita and Michael said to me, ‘we thought it best to ask Bill Watson to wait outside, he looks a bit wild in his bandana.’ They jested about him looking like a Mexican bandit.

It’s no-one’s fault. Anita and Michael had my interests to protect. Big Bill understood perfectly, but the vision of my sick friend in his bandana sitting on the court steps thinking I said not to come in haunts me.

AFTER nearly 25 years of psychological and psychiatric examinations and treatment at the hands of the guesswork gurus of medical science, as well being on and off various medications, my old and dear friend Dave the Jew has recently been told that he has been incorrectly treated for a schizophrenic condition that he never suffered from in the first place. According to the latest scientific breakthrough he has simply suffered from a paranoid psychosis brought about from the horror death-camp stories he was told as a child by his various relatives.

In other words, he suffers from a psychopathic personality. Christ, I told him this when he was 16 years old.

We would go to Dave’s place for Sunday afternoon tea with his mum and dad and assorted ‘uncles and aunties’, who were not really related to him but were close friends of the family who had also survived the death camps in Europe.

Dave’s ‘uncle’ Aaron, who survived Belsen with Dave’s dad, would roll up his sleeve and show his tattoo on his left forearm and launch into yet another horror story.

On one occasion Dave said to Uncle Aaron, ‘tell Mark about the time the SS Officer shot your mother’. The room was full of crying people and Dave was almost out of his mind with hate and rage.

Dave the Jew’s dad walked into the lounge room and said to Aaron, ‘he charges $75 per hour’. Aaron looked up and asked who charged $75 per hour and Dave’s dad said, ‘the psychiatrist we send young David to three times a week. Can’t you cheer up for five minutes. You are sending the boy mad.’

But Aaron argued he must be told, that he must know the truth. Dave’s dad got angry. ‘We already took care of that. He has been dreaming about Belsen since he was nine years old. Now all he talks about is killing people or revenge and hate.’

It was true. I had heard about 100 different death camp stories from the people I would meet at afternoon tea at Dave’s place and I found myself having dreams about the camps, as if I had been there myself.

It had a deep effect on my mental and emotional wellbeing, and if that was happening to me in the space of approximately one year, I dread to think what it was doing to poor Dave’s mind. Instead of a bedtime story as a child he would get a death camp story, and dream of Adolf Hitler.

The mothers and fathers who survived the death camps passed on a death-camp psychosis to their children, even if they were born a long time after the war. I listened to those stories for about a year until I could hear no more and found myself dreaming that I was riding the train to one of the death camps. If I was not a well unit when I started going to these tea parties I was positively feral after a year of it, and I wasn’t even Jewish. But as one old Jew pointed out, ‘Mark, your father is a Freemason. Do you know how many Freemasons the Nazis put to death? Thousands and thousands – and their families.’

In the end I stopped going to Dave’s place for Sunday afternoon teas and when I told Dave about the dreams and my reasons for not visiting his home any more his mother came to see me with Dave in tears, and said sorry, and we all ended up in tears together.

She took a small gold star of David and gold chain from around her neck and hung it around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Mark, you are my second son.’

Dave’s mum was a beautiful lady and I loved her dearly, but if a year of death-camp stories still hang with me today imagine what a whole childhood of horror stories would do to the human mind. The ‘death-camp psychosis’ suffered by the children of the holocaust survivors is a very real thing.

It spun me out. No wonder Dave took a turn for the worse in later life. His childhood left mental scars which will never heal. Any only child listening to that stuff was always going to be in trouble. They said he had to hear it, that he had to be told, but his dad was right: ‘for God’s sake let’s cheer up a bit’. No wonder there are so many Jewish comedians. It’s either laugh or cry. Bloody hell. It still spins me out, just remembering it.

Poor Dave was an intelligent teenager who ended up being probably the best secret hitman in Australia – and a man who liked to ‘experiment’ on his victims in a way which made even me shiver. He was convinced he was the reincarnation of the American Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel. Now in times of high unemployment this is not a good thing to put on one’s CV. Imagine it. Name: Bugsy Siegel. Occupation: 1930s US Gangster. References: Al Capone, Eliot Ness and Meyer Lansky.

Dave was, and is, a great friend and remains staunch at all times. He was prepared to hop over to Tassie and help a few Crown witnesses in my trial reconsider their points of view, but I asked him to leave well enough alone. Then again, he’s on the outside and I’m on the inside. So who’s the crazy one?

SPEAKING of Dave the Jew, he was recently talked out of some madcap plan to return to Israel by an old and dear friend of his family in Tel Aviv who spent some months making phone calls to Melbourne trying to explain to Dave that he can’t just piss off from the Israeli army the way he did and return years later and expect all to be forgiven. If he goes back and isn’t shot he most certainly will finish up in an Israeli military prison.

Dave’s idea about returning to Israel was a bit of a worry for me, as I knew it would be the finish of him. But next it seems he wants to get his passport and travel to France and try to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. He was greatly offended when I sent him a message that even the French Foreign Legion would insist on a psychiatric examination. And, besides, he hates the French. Now he wants to come and live with me and Mary-Ann when I get out of jail. Ha ha. I can just see that … Mary-Ann would go out the back door one day and end up vanishing like a German backpacker.

Poor Dave, I love him. I often think back and see in my mind’s eye myself and the Jew sitting beside Squizzy Taylor’s grave (born June 29, 1888; died October 26, 1927) talking of the future. The trouble was that we were so hell bent on trying to control our destinies that we both forgot we had no control over our fate.

THE rumor mill is still working overtime. If it is to be believed, Mad Micky Marlow, Dennis Carr and Robbie Riley have all teamed up and, armed to the teeth, have made trips to the mainland, all expenses paid by me, in search of ‘Never tell a lie' Sid.

Having no success in locating Sid, the tale goes, they returned to Tassie and proceeded to hunt down Trent Anthony. Stories of near hits and close calls are running rampant, with one wild yarn involving Dave the Jew and a car chase. The story goes that when ‘Dave' finally forced a car over to the side of the road it contained the wrong person, not Sid at all.

I don't believe this story. Because, let me assure you, Dave rarely gets the wrong person.

Another wild yarn concerns a ‘$20,000 contract' on both Sid and Anthony, with the Launceston CIB arresting Micky Marlow and Dennis Carr parked outside a police safe house.

Robbie Riley who is, pound for pound, a top-rated street fighter in Tassie and a wild boy generally, was supposed to be involved in a fight with three members of the Outlaw motorcycle gang trying to protect Sid.

Stories of car chases, shots fired, fist fights and attempted hits allegedly involving my mates from Tassie and the mainland keep cropping up. And, just to keep it balanced, there have been other tall stories about members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang offering money to try to get me killed in jail. No crim in Tassie is so short of money that he wants to commit ‘suicide by Chopper', believe me.

There have even been plots to kill my dad, according to the rumor mongers. Mad Micky Marlow is an old and dear friend but he is now a dad and he and his lovely wife Kelly have gone bush with their baby daughter. He stays in touch with me and calls in to see my old Dad. Dennis Carr is a young mate and a friend of Micky's, and he also sees my old Dad now and again, but Dennis hardly ever sees Micky these days.

Robbie Riley, the streetfighting man, is a friend of mine and Dennis Carr and Micky Marlow. I was very good friends with Robbie Riley's late brother big Johnny Riley. He was a top Melbourne crook and a very hard man, and very respected in the Melbourne criminal scene. Johnny and I were very good friends in Pentridge, but he got himself stabbed to death outside a pub in Fitzroy in 1981.

Years later I had a fall out with the Turk who did that. But that, as they say in the classics, is another story.

Robbie Riley was in the remand yard with me last year but he is out and about now and living on Flinders Island, and though he is still friends with Dennis Carr and Micky Marlow, he does not mix with them socially.

So how do these insane stories and rumors get started?

I'm so flat broke I've told my lawyers to file an appeal to the High Court of Australia against my sentence. What my lawyers do not know is that I don't have the money at this point to pay them.

All the book royalties from my previous classics have already been spent on high-flying legal eagles. If I had my life over again I would be a lawyer. You make more money with a law book than a blow torch, let me tell you.

The Supreme Court appeal against my sentence broke me, so how I could fund the efforts of three men to run around in search of Sid and Trent Anthony is beyond me, even if I wanted to.

What the rumor mongers don't understand is I don't want anything at all to happen to Sid and Trent. If anything happened to either of them it is very doubtful that I would ever be released from prison. How would I look trying to plead to the authorities to release me and meanwhile both my Crown witnesses are on the missing list? In fact, if either of them caught a cold I would send the chicken soup, made from an old recipe from Dave the Jew's mother.

Micky Marlow suspects that half these mad rumors are started by the police and the other half are started by drunks in pubs. Perhaps some of them are started by drunken police in pubs.

THE most wonderful thing about Tasmania, in my opinion, is that everybody seems to be either related or friends with each other, or friends with a relative or related to a friend.

The whole state seems to be interconnected. My old driver, Trent Anthony, who, along with Sid, went Crown evidence against me and helped to get me this twelfth of never Governor's Pleasure sentence, is in hiding in Tasmania and has been ever since my trial. (Incidentally, it's a great title for a lagging in jail with no release date, isn't it? Governor's Pleasure indeed. I hope it pleases him because it sure as hell pisses me off something shocking.) But back to Trent and his movements. I get reports of him being sighted in Perth then in Launceston. I hope the brain surgeon has joined a frequent flyer's club: he might end up getting a free ticket to a give-ups convention somewhere. It would be great; they could have a big dinner where all the name tags would say ‘John Smith'. They could have the dinner in Asia and serve dog, but that would be a bit like cannibalism for someone like Trent.

I got a letter from an old and dear friend of mine called Kay saying that young Trent, along with his good lady wife and new baby, moved into a house in the same street as Kay in Mayfield, Launceston. Which proves that it is impossible to hide in the Apple Isle for long.

Next thing I find, Trent's own brother-in-law ends up in C Yard working in the laundry with me. His name is Jamie Young. Jamie's baby sister, Karen, is married to Trent. I knew Karen quite well. She is a lovely kid and far too good for a thing like Trent Anthony, in my humble opinion.

I think Karen would look very fetching in black. I observe this purely as a fashion statement and this should not be misconstrued.

Jamie is also friends with my old mate Mike Alexander, the former publican of the Clarendon Arms Hotel in Evandale. The Clarendon was the pub where I was supposed to be drinking with Sid shortly before he had his plumbing rearranged with a bullet.

Mike is no longer at the Clarendon Arms but now runs the Bridport Hotel on the north-east coast of Tassie with his mate Dave Kruska. Jamie Young is a fisherman at Bridport and drinks at the Bridport pub. That is, when he's not in jail. It seems Mike Alexander is still a keen punter. In fact, I've heard it said he still thinks a Pimm's Number One Cup is a hurdle at Flemington.

I am not the least bit interested in revenge against Trent Anthony and I told Jamie to pass the message along. If I wanted to reach out from jail and touch Trent on the shoulder – or anywhere else – it would be so easy, but why bother? It seems he lives his life in mindless fear and paranoia, convinced that my secret agents are going to come up through his floorboards any minute.

Paranoia will destroy them all in the end.