Chopper Unchopped (83 page)

Can you believe that? Yet the same young men know the words off by heart to half the songs AC/DC ever wrote.

Who was it who wrote
Poor Fellow My Country?
Xavier Herbert? Well, he wasn’t far wrong, was he?

The Americanisation of Australia seems to be the problem. The Yanks killed Phar Lap and Les Darcy and they have been trying to kill off everything Australian ever since. The buggers have nearly done it and I’m just as bloody guilty as everyone else for falling victim to it.

This country has a great history and yet you wouldn’t know it. The kids walk around with baseball hats on, shirts with gridiron teams’ emblems on the front. They have pictures of American basketballers on their walls. They think Chips Rafferty invented the potato cake.

We look up to Yankeeland heroes and look down on our own. It makes me bloody sick. Too much bloody television, if you ask me. It’s killing us all. Kids should not be indoors watching television, they should be outside, punching on with their mates, getting a bit of fresh air and doing a bit of male bonding.

Mind you, my distaste for America does not include Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson. God bless them all, the dirty rats.

ONE of my pet hates is the way Aussie country music has gone. These boys and girls make me cringe with embarrassment when they bung on accents like they were brought up in Mississippi. It is yet another case of the Americanisation of Australia.

You get truck drivers from Nowra who sing like Willie Nelson. You get cowgirls from Queensland who sound like they were brought up in Dallas.

THE day I hear Slim Dusty sing the American national anthem is they day I’ll get a rope and a chair and hang myself.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have just attended what is called a poetry workshop conducted by a noted Australian poet and author, Dorothy Porter, bless her heart. She put us through a somewhat spaced-out semi-psychological trip into the world of the modern poet.

Apparently Lawson and Paterson are yesterday’s men, swept aside with the wave of an academic hand. The poets of today seem to be taken with the autumn leaf that fell to the ground while the author sits on top of the fridge crying tears that belong to the next door neighbor’s goldfish, all to the tune of one hand clapping.

Perish the thought that anyone should write a poem that actually rhymes. Miss Porter was much taken with the Japanese style of poetry called ‘haiku’. Yes, that’s what Aussie land needs, a little more Japanese culture jammed down our simple literary necks.

I read a poem to Miss Porter. It went down like a fart in church. I don’t know haiku, I like my fish cooked, I eat red meat and I drink my coffee out of a mug, not a glass, so I will never be considered a trendy. But one thing I know, and that is that my poems rhyme.

These government grant authors and poets may think of me as some dumb bar-room story teller, but I think some of them are ‘Beam me up Scottie’ space cadets. Some of these people seem to think if it comes from Australia it must be crap. As far as I am concerned give me the local product every time.

Miss Porter may be all the rage in the sushi bar set, but I reckon I’m not too bad when it comes to a bit of Aussie-style poetry. You be the judge. Here’s a couple, one about my old mate, the former Chief Magistrate of Victoria, Darcy Dugan, and the other about Supreme Court judge and head of the parole board Frank ‘The Tank’ Vincent.

EVERY now and again the jail allows concerts. The last show the prison put on was a South African bongo player and it went down like a turd in a punch bowl. What this jail needs is what Pentridge put on in the early ’70s – a strip show with a professional stripper. I happen to know several professional strippers who would be only too pleased to come into the jail and put on a properly-run show for no charge whatsoever.

Any inmate wishing to attend the event could cough up $5 and all the money could be given to the prison sports and recreation fund. You’d get at least a hundred prisoners wishing to attend, it would be a fun night out and a good little earner.

It would also lead to prisoners making a great effort to behave in jail. They would remember what pussy looked like and would be on their best behavior to get out as soon as possible.

‘Alexandra the great 48’ nearly caused a riot in B Division in Pentridge when she put on a show. But when the South African bongo player showed up at the Pink Palace only about seven inmates bothered to attend. At least a properly run and tasteful strip show would encourage prisoner interest.

If we do happen to get a few strippers into the jail, they won’t miss me. I’ll be the bloke in the front row looking as flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Two gold teeth, in fact, and that’s not all. In September Dr Carlton, the prison dentist, fitted me with my new super-duper cobalt chrome false teeth, which include two solid gold teeth in front. I’ve had them in ever since. They fit a treat and my smile is the envy of the prison, with every crook in the jail with teeth missing – and there’s a few – now wanting to invest in a cobalt chrome denture with gold teeth as an optional extra.

Ahh, Chopper, you old trendsetter. But as I said to the boys, if you really want to look like the Chopper, get them bloody ears off. The mention of the razor blade slicing through the ears soon separates the men from the boys.

MY young legal advisers Peter Warmbrunn and Anita Valentine come in to see me occasionally. Painless Pete is turning into a bonny courtroom buccaneer, and Anita Valentine is well-named: my heart skips a beat whenever I see her. I’ve promised to toss a nice murder case her way some time in the future, when she feels herself ready for the big one.

I tossed Anita Betts a nice case in the form of the Amanda Carter murder mystery – a 13-year-old mystery and probably the biggest murder case in Tasmania this century. The accused sought my advice regarding legal help when he came into the remand yard in 1993 and I promptly advised him to forget all others and hire Anita Betts. I’m sure I can muster up a nice little murder case for young Anita Valentine when she is ready to rock and roll. That reminds me. I must toss a murder case to Peter Warmbrunn next time a nice little stabbing or shooting or acid bath killer jumps up.

My wise old legal adviser and courtroom chess player Mr Pat (God Bless Him) Harvey, the solicitor who helped save my neck in the ‘Sammy the Turk’ murder case, once said to me, ‘Chopper, a criminal lawyer’s reputation is made or broken in the remand yard of a prison.’

That advice I passed on to Anita Betts, and she in turn to Peter Warmbrunn, and he in turn passed these words of wisdom to the lovely Miss Valentine. Meaning that Anita Betts and her legal firm practically live in the remand yard at Risdon, visiting clients, and have grown into the strongest legal firm in Tasmania. While all around them, most of the other lawyers in town are starving to death. Ha ha.

The so-called big name lawyers in Tassie prior to my arrival in the state have sunk like the
Titanic
. They were big ships once, but they are all at the bottom of the sea now. Why? Because criminals decide who the best criminal lawyers are … a small point that lawyers forget. If I stand on the muster line in front of the whole yard and I’m asked by a young bloke in trouble, ‘Hey, Chopper, I’ve got Mr So-and-so as my lawyer, what do you reckon of him?’ and I spit on the ground and say, ‘Sack the bum, he’s a rat and you can’t trust him’, then I’m afraid that’s one sacked lawyer.

You need more than a legal degree to be a lawyer. You need to care, because you’re dealing with men and women in trouble. Guilty or innocent, these poor buggers are at their wits’ end. Some are on the edge of suicide or, at best, a nervous breakdown.

The remand yard of a prison is a cold and lonely place, and your lawyer for that period in your life is your only true friend, and my advice to any who seek it, is to pick your friends wisely.

THE more I see the way poor old Aussieland is going the madder I become. I grew up as a good little racist under the White Australia policy and like every other red-blooded Aussie kid of that era, enjoyed putting a goodly bit of comical shit on the Abos, spooks, coons, slopes, chows, dagos, spags, spics, greasers and wogs – and whatever other Third World gin jockey or porch monkey that came along. And what bloody good fun it was.

Yet the same Aussie kids would put shit on the Germans for what they did to the Jews, and we always enjoyed hating the filthy Japs for what they did to the Diggers during the Second World War.

We all grew up racist but we picked and chose. There were exceptions and contradictions to our racist rules and all in the name of fun. We would put shit on the Abos, yet jump to their defence if any outsider such as some wog tried to put shit on what was after all the real Australian. We were, and still are, a confused lot of buggers indeed.

Australia has no religious hatreds apart from the fact that everyone’s dad was either a Catholic or a Freemason. We would happily put shit on every wog in town, except of course for the Italian and Greek kids we classed as our friends, because they weren’t wogs, they were our mates.

The wogs were the buggers from the next suburb we fought with on Saturday night.

As far as our racist attitudes went we invented the rules as we went along, making exceptions for friends and allowing all sorts of contradictions to our elastic rules.

I guess you could say that our racist attitude was a rule of law that we applied nine out of ten times. Sporting identities, boxers, footy players and wog chicks with big tits were the general exceptions, and our friends of the non-Australian variety.

What a confused bunch of two-faced racists we were and still are. But the rising wave of nutters and neo-Nazi groups have tossed new cards into our old relaxed deck. These buggers hate everybody: the blacks, Asians, the wogs, the Left wingers, the greenies, the Catholics, the Jews, and the Freemasons. They say they hate the homosexuals, yet Nazi history is littered with rampant homosexuals. The head of Hitler’s ‘brown shirts’, Ernst Rohm, was as ‘camp as a row of mein tents’. Adolf Hitler’s maternal grandmother was a Jew, so too was the maternal grandmother of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, S.S. Oberfuhrer ‘General’ Reinhard Heydrich.

In fact, when one checks the family histories and sexual taste of the world’s leading Nazis you’ll find shady bloodlines and freckle punchers littering their ranks. The big Nazi rallies should be part of Sydney’s gay mardi gras – they would be at home there.

The whole thing is bunghole rubbish. The neo-Nazis in Germany today hate the Turks, yet the Turks backed Germany in the First World War and backed Hitler in the Second World War.

Shocking punters the Turks: two bets for two losses. I agree that the influx of Vietnamese and other Asian peoples to Australia today is creating big social problems and a lot of jealousy and resentment and for good reason. The poor old Aussie feels like a stranger in his own country, but waving swastikas and joining the ranks of the neo-Nazis is not the way to go.

In Pentridge we created a joke version of the Ku Klux Klan, but the whole thing was a giggle. I was wearing a pillowcase, standing next to two prison officers. Some said it improved my looks. Foul slander, I say.

But the whole racial question is getting out of hand and I believe it is a serious problem. I believe that everything will sort itself out in time. But the neo-Nazis see the Aussies’ natural dislike of outsiders as a tool to be used to get the average Australian to agree with the Nazis on the Asian question. They would then argue, ‘You must also agree that the Jews must go as well, the Catholic church, and the Freemasons’. The list is endless.

It’s nonsense, but very dangerous nonsense.

SPEAKING of growing up with wogs, it was with some amusement that I noted the arrest of Trevor Pettingill along with a Calabrian gentleman on charges relating to two crops from a marijuana plantation near Driffield, wherever the hell Driffield is.
(Near Sale in Gippsland – ed.)

The arrest of Pettingill is a small change matter. In my opinion he is and will always remain a two-bob nothing little punk in a posh suit his mummy bought him, in spite of his acquittal along with others in the Walsh Street shootings. What interests and amazes me is that his co-accused was not only a Calabrian, but one whose family I think I grew up with in the northern suburbs. If it is the same family, they were a very large and respected Italian family indeed, and it surprises me that any member of it might associate with low-rent rubbish like Trevor Pettingill. I went to school in Thomastown with a family of Calabrians, fought alongside them in street battles and remember them with fondness. This particular family were very closeknit and respected, but Thomastown in those days was a Sicilian stronghold, and the Sicilians always had the whip hand. I remember having a punch on with one of the Calabrian boys and being set upon by various of his relatives, only to be rescued by a guy called ‘Teacup’ Tommy with a few simple words spoken in his thick Sicilian accent.

I didn’t understand Italian too well then, although I ended up being able to speak it well enough to make myself understood. But, I believe Tommy’s words related to killing their mother if they continued to hit me.

Sicilians, Tommy always told me, took no nonsense from Calabrians. The big Italian crime families in Australia are all of Calabrian blood. However, as Tommy and my old mate ‘Poppa’ told me, the Calabrians run it all because the Sicilians allow them to do so. That’s how it works in Italy, and that’s how it works here.

Any Calabrian family which wishes to operate in certain areas of interest without the nodding approval of the Sicilians could very well find themselves lying dead beside a river with their ears cut off. But that, as they say in the classics, is another story.

The newspapers and TV are full of mafia this and mafia that, but the Calabrian crime families are not mafia. The Sicilians are the true mafia, and the Calabrians operate on a sort of licence from them. I’ve seen fully grown 40 and 50-year-old hard Calabrian men cross the road and walk on the other side to avoid ‘Teacup’ Tommy and Little Mario, who were only teenage tough kids, because the Sicilians represented what the Calabrians only pretended to be. ‘Teacup’ would always spit on the ground when walking past a Calabrian in Thomastown, and fully-grown men would cop this sweet and walk on. The structure of the Italian crime world and families was explained to me at an early age, and I’ve taken a keen interest in it ever since.

All I can say is that Trevor ‘small change’ Pettingill will want to pray to God that it wasn’t his fault that the Calabrian got pinched with him, as the families I knew would eat the Pettingills for Sunday lunch. The Calabrians are without question the leading organised crime power in Australia, as they operate with the full approval of their Sicilian ‘masters’. However, as I’ve mentioned in my other books, there is a situation unique in Melbourne, and that is the horrific reputation of one small ethnic group whose presence maintains a peaceful balance of power. And that is the Albanians. The Albanian mafia and its thirst for revenge and bloodshed not only keeps the Calabrians in check, but the Sicilians don’t particularly want to go out of their way to upset them either. Ha ha.

In 1987 a crew of Calabrians swore to kill me, but my simple friendship with two Albanian gentlemen prevented the Calabrians from moving against me in force. These two gentlemen were not criminals. Perish the thought. However, I owe my life to old Norm Dardovski and young Neville, as had any Calabrian bullet fired at me accidentally hit one of the Dardovski family the Albanians would have drowned the offenders and every relative they had in a river of blood. The loyalty and friendship of the Dardovski family is something I will never forget.

Now we watch TV and, as I predicted years ago, we see the Vietnamese flexing their muscles. The Chinese, in the form of the 14K, are long established and going peacefully about their business, but the Vietnamese aim to overtake them, and from there they will team up with or overtake the Italians. Then, in ten years or less, they will run into the Albanians. Then you’ll find Vietnamese popping up all over the place as dead as doornails. Ha ha.

The Sicilians will threaten to kill your mother. The Vietnamese really will kill your mother. However, the Albanian mafia will actually not only kill your mother but put the body in the cooking pot. The KGB didn’t use the Albanians as hitmen for nothing. Next to the Irish, they would be the greatest mental cases in the criminal world. Forgive my raving on, but the recent drive-by shooting death of John Newman, the MP in NSW, has again triggered my thoughts about the Vietnamese and the ladder I can see them climbing.

What the Viets forget is that they all come from large families – meaning they can be ‘got at’. The Viets will kill your family. The Albanians will revenge tenfold – and the Irish-Aussie criminal gets a bit puzzled by it all, and will run around half full of Irish whisky and shoot rapid fire at anything that looks sideways at him from a distance of 300 yards. In the criminal wars, the smartest get the cash, but the maddest get the victory, and the Aussie-Irish-Scottish-English old school crook has yet to meet his equal, which fills my heart with a certain joy. As while the wogs and rice eaters battle it out, the Aussie old school still rule. As (Linus Patrick) Driscoll once said, there’s no mafia in Belfast. An attitude which means that the Aussie crook will never be beaten in his own land. Ha ha. Thank God.

BACK in the middle of June another bright spark took early parole. He hanged himself ten minutes before lunch. We had Chiko rolls too. Yummy. I’ve heard of food critics but that’s bloody ridiculous.

I shouldn’t laugh at the despair of others, but it’s a sort of sad laughter. Poor bastards.

That’s the second hanging in six weeks. Good thing they weren’t black or all hell would break loose. White fellas are stringing themselves up and slashing their wrists and necks in jails and police lockups all over Australia and as soon as an Abo does it the Prime Minister gets a phone call.

The poor old white fellas in custody are going down like tent pegs and no bugger says a word, but when Truganini’s great-grandson takes a nosedive off the top landing suddenly it’s a day of national mourning.

What about the poor white kids? I guess that bit of sarcasm is in bad taste, but it is true the white deaths in custody far outweigh the black deaths yet no-one ever seems to notice the poor buggers unless they are of Aboriginal descent.

The whole topic of suicide in prison or police stations is sad and depressing and it puts you in a very solemn frame of mind. If you don’t have a bit of a black comedy – sorry, dark comedy – you soon become depressed.

The whole thing is very sad but you can’t legislate against suicide. Of all the living things man is the only one who commits suicide so it must be part of our nature.

TASMANIA is the land of the snow-white Abo. When I first got to Risdon Prison one of the first questions I was asked was did I claim Aboriginal descent. Had I done so the Aboriginal legal aid service would have funded my legal case, or so I was told.

All anyone has to do down here is claim Aboriginal descent to be classed as an Aboriginal, and then you can claim and get all manner of wonders bestowed upon you. While there are quite a few real true-blue Abos in Tassie and they are good blokes too, the ones I’ve met, there are three times as many who are so white, blue-eyed and blond that they look like members of the bloomin’ Nazi party.

But because their great great grandfathers once waved at Truganini from a distance of 300 yards, they claim Aboriginal descent and jump on the gravy train.

If you have feathers and webbed feet, if you swim in water and go quack quack and look like a duck then it’s a safe bet you’re a bloody duck, it doesn’t matter if your great, great grandfather was a bloody budgie. If you have white skin and blond or red hair, or any color hair for that matter, then you’re white. It’s no use trying to say you’re a black man.

For crying out loud, my great granny was Chinese, my dear old Dad is quarter caste Chinese, but that don’t mean that I can walk up to the Chinese Embassy and say ‘give us a bloody passport’. The Chinese side of the family came to Australia during the goldrush days but that don’t make me a Chinaman, for God’s sake.

(Speaking of this, a distant cousin wrote to inform me that my Chinese great grandmother I mentioned in my first book was not the only Chinese connection in my family tree. There was a great great grandfather named Cheong Shin Hun on my grandfather’s side of the family. It is all quite confusing, but it seems there is Chinese blood on both sides of my dad’s family. Cheong Shin Hun probably means ‘hand over the money, slanty eyes’. Maybe I should be called ‘Chopsticks’ Read.)

With my family Chinese connection, should I pull up on the Asian jokes? I think not.

The other side of the clan is Irish, but that don’t make me a bloody leprechaun, either. I’m an Aussie, a white man with a teaspoon full of ‘Fu Manchu’ in my bloodline. Big deal. But there is so much to be gained from the state and federal governments if you claim Aboriginal descent and are smart and know how to play the system that a lot of white people are jumping on the gravy train.

All a 16-year-old unmarried mother has to do is tell the hospital that her newborn baby’s father is an Aboriginal and she and the baby are sweet.

I reckon the Aussie Abo is a good bloke and good luck to him. It’s these white false pretenders that create all the trouble. I’m not dirty on the poor old dinky-di Abos, I don’t think any Aussie is, but I am a bit dirty on the snow-white ‘Koorie’ fakes who on the strength of nothing, or a teaspoon of Aboriginal blood 100 years back, expect the Aussie taxpayer to wipe their backsides for them for the rest of their lives. The whole thing has gotten out of hand. The whiter they get the more they bloody want. They’re as bad as the bloody public servants.