MANY years ago, around 1969, in the midst of street fights and teenage gang trouble in Thomastown, I had taken to covert action against my enemy. Rocks through windows at night. A petrol can and a box of matches left at a front door step. A .22 calibre slug from a bolt-action rifle through the front door at night. Death threat phone calls. Turning their power off at night. Home-made fire bombs tossed at front doors. In several cases I burnt down their outside Thunderbox dunny toilets. I’d slash the tyres on the family car. Put bricks through the windscreen. In several cases I’d poison the family dog.
Generally, I was a 15-year-old arsehole, and to top it off I started to spread rumours that these covert activities were being carried out by three criminal brothers, Nick, Paul and Rocco Shachini. The rumours spread over the years. I would hear that this or that unsolved murder or shooting was carried out by the brothers.
When I first met Mad Charlie, he had heard the feared reputation of the shadowy brothers and was impressed that I knew them. Alphonse Gangitano claimed to actually know the fabulous Shachini brothers.
Personally, I stopped telling wild Shachini brother stories in about 1975, but it was too late – the imaginary Shachinis had taken on a life all of their own in the form of a Sicilian Mafia family from Thomastown who secretly controlled Italian criminal concerns throughout the northern suburbs in the eighties.
I was often asked if I knew them or had heard of them, by men claiming to know them and to be criminally involved with them. I then would reply that, like others, I’d heard of them but had never met them.
It had long been forgotten by the teenage kids of years ago that Chopper Read was the first one ever to mention the Shachini Brothers.
In 1987, an old Italian man who I will call Poppa Tony told me that the former NSW vice king, Maltese Joe Borg, was blown to death in his car in 1969 on the orders of the Shachini brothers. Poppa Tony wasn’t lying – he was repeating a story he believed to be true.
The Shachini brothers were also rumoured to have disposed of the mortal remains of anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay. And rumoured to be the private hit squad behind the international drug king, Howard Marks. The name of the three brothers has now run its natural race and they are only spoken of in whispers by old men and men who are desperate to find the answer to an unsolvable riddle.
But, for a time, this invented myth played a large role in my own disinformation campaigns and helped to create my own personal method of tactical and strategic gang warfare, which I would later call my ‘psychology of fear’ theory. I would refine it over the years but what I learned when I was 15 was to become the biggest plank of my methods – and many a crook would be forced to walk it before I was done.
It wasn’t courage or bravery that made me disregard most of what I heard from criminals, media and police regarding rumoured death contracts on my own life. Fact was, various times I was told the contracts had been ordered by the great Shachini brothers themselves. I mean, the whole criminal world was a mishmash of bullshit with a dead body or two tossed in the pot now and again to add weight to the raging river of lies. Was it any wonder that no one could stop me from laughing. I wasn’t mad, I just knew the truth, a truth that no one would ever believe.
As a master of propaganda, I could pick a disinformation campaign from a distance. Don’t kid a kidder and don’t bullshit a killer. Most of these stories I knew were fairy tales and those that weren’t … well, sometimes spin doctors weren’t enough. Sometimes, real bullets were needed.
Why is it so? Because some nitwit has put it in writing and told you it is so. Read the Bible, then tell me that people can’t be tricked by disinformation. People believe what they want to believe. In the criminal world the only trick is to come up with disinformation that the crims, media and police can all agree on. That’s why the poor old general public has done more bulk swallowing than Linda Lovelace. A book on true crime – I doubt that such a book has ever been written, in the history of man. The closest would be the most excellent Underbelly series which I keep on my bedside table for night-time reading.
We are now surfing in a sea of disinformation. It’s night time and we can’t see the sky or the beach. We are just surfing in the direction that the waves are taking us. We are all surfing on a lie. The only truth is, if we fall in we die.
Are you beginning to understand the world I’m trying to take you to? What the media, police, writers and movie directors call the underworld. The logic is to ignore logic. You have to unlearn what you have been taught.
That is why people, including police, never truly understand the underworld. They think too much. They start by saying, ‘If I was the crook I would have done this.’ They give most crooks too much credit for planning and logic. Dennis Allen shot a bloke for putting the wrong record on in his lounge room. Work that out – he would have been a shocking DJ.
We had a war in jail because I was alleged to have eaten too many sausages, a foul piece of slander indeed – although I must say they were yummy.
Nothing makes sense and when you understand that, everything falls into place. There is no logic in shooting someone outside a crowded nightclub, cutting your ears off and baseball batting various fat wombats in front of witnesses.
There is no master plan, just a sea of human filth trying to get to the surface for a breath of pure air. I have known of crims on their way to a million-dollar heroin deal who have shoplifted a coat on the way. If they had been caught, the deal would have gone sour. Why did they do it? Because they could.
End of story, or rather, just the beginning. Are you getting the picture? Do you want me to draw a map? You’re in Northern Ireland and a man walks up to you in the dark and puts a loaded gun to your head. He pulls the hammer back and asks, ‘What religion are you?’ You have but a few seconds to reply or die, and the wrong reply will kill you. To reply and prevent the gunman from killing you, then to make him puzzle and think and look and ask questions, allowing you precious seconds to somersault the whole situation. It is the trick and the trick is disinformation.
How would you reply? I’ve spent most of my life, not only replying in the correct manner, but walking away with the gunman’s weapon and him convinced that he was lucky to get out of the situation with his life. That, my dear reader, is the psychology of fear. Master that and you can master the world. It is bluff, backed by a baby .410 shotgun and an army of psychopaths. The art is looking to be out of control when you are very much in control.
You’re still surfing in the dark, aren’t you? Let’s hope that when you get to the last page, you will see the sunlight. I will have to expose myself, and after nine best sellers, three music CDs and a movie made about my life, a sunglass contract and an international profile, it may be time to expose the real me.
Or not.
What do I care. I’ve won the game and in telling you, even in a small way, how I did it will not be considered bragging, I would hope. A magician is not a liar or a conman. He has just made you believe that what you didn’t see really did happen and what you really did see didn’t happen at all. If he can make you laugh at the same time you belong to him for he has, for a moment, captured your imagination. I am the magician who doesn’t pull a rabbit from his hat but a pistol from his underpants.
Many years ago a very well-known radio type, later to become a TV personality, was debating the rape issue on talkback radio with a high profile lady in the women’s movement. She stopped him dead by saying, ‘Well, it’s a waste of my time debating this point with you. You have never been raped – I have.’
The next day, the radio personality, shocked his listeners by breaking down and tearfully confessing that he had been the victim of sexual molestation as a child at the hands of his uncle. Game, set and match to him. He had not only won the debate but gained the sympathy of a whole new audience.
The only evidence that what he said was true was his own word. But why would a man say such a thing if it weren’t true? Why indeed! Think of the psychological advantage. Another famous personality comes out and confesses to being homosexual, then writes a best seller on the topic. The truth was he was really straight and just pretending to be gay.
How many famous American TV and movie personalities have broken down in tears on national television with stories like ‘daddy played with my rubber duckie in the bath when I was six and my mother held me at gun point while he did it’? There are too many to count.
It all comes back to what Hitler said about people always believing a really big lie. Chopper Read comes out and tells people he has murdered nineteen people and bang, he’s a psycho killer overnight.
No one stops to say hang on, hang on, let’s have a look at this. Some half-retarded moll says she is the mother of Mick Jagger’s love child and bingo! That’s that. Elvis Presley isn’t really dead. Adolf Hitler was seen sunning himself outside a cafe in Argentina in 1967. Lee Harvey Oswald really did shoot Kennedy.
Did they really put a man on the moon or was it a CIA, White House, Hollywood con trick to kid the world and the USSR that the Americans did it?
Okay, okay, that’s a bit far fetched – although it wouldn’t surprise me if Dave the Jew was the first man on the moon – or shot the bloke who was.
What I am getting at is we believe most of what we are told or what we read or see on the six o’clock news. It is human nature to want to believe that we are hearing and reading. If we do not believe what we are told what have we got left? What fills the void?
We all know politicians are liars, yet we not only vote them into office, we pay them a lot of money and we believe what they tell us while knowing all the time that most of them can’t be trusted.
What does that tell us about human nature? For Christ’s sake, I’m probably the greatest liar and disseminator of disinformation in Australian criminal history. Let’s face it, I’m a raving bullshit artist but I can make people laugh while telling them a lie and, psychologically, if a person is laughing while listening to a story or reading a story, then he or she is subconsciously believing the story. You can’t shoot me when you’re laughing, but I am the master of the side-splitting joke. Literally.
Yes, I have shot a few and a few have died – big deal. But, in reality, Chopper Read was a less than average criminal who used greater than average violence for less than average money. But Chopper Read could spin a greater than above average story and he could get people laughing. I’m a self-made man with an unmade face and an unfilled grave. It has now reached the stage that fact can no longer be separated from fiction.
That’s what a true legend is. A legend is a myth. It is a lie welded together with the truth and used as a cosh to beat the unsuspecting around the head. I’ve done it and now I’m telling you, believe nothing except what you yourself believe to be true while all the time being aware that you could be wrong.
I will take a little mental rest now. My doctor warned me not to get into these spinouts as I start to waffle and I suspect I’m starting to rave a little. Then again, sometimes the truth of a situation can be clearly seen only after talking to a total mental case.
I must go and find one.
*
A MATE of mine, Shane Farmer, a local nightclub owner, once said to me, ‘Chopper, you have created a legend and built yourself into a national celebrity and now you want to come back and write a book and tell everyone it is all bullshit. Why?’
No, I don’t, my point is, that it could all be bullshit. For example, take Dave the Jew. Until I made mention of him in my first book, no one had ever heard of him. Now he is being blamed for unsolved murders all over Melbourne. They even questioned him over the death of Alphonse.
Yes, I know a bloke named Dave and, yes, he is a Jew, but I created his reputation and I created a legend.
Was it all fact or fantasy? Only I will ever know. Dave and me, that is. Now the legend of Dave the Jew, thanks to me, has taken on a life all of its own. This is my point, it’s not hard to create a myth or a legend or give a totally unknown a feared reputation, then to step back and watch your own creation take on a life all of its own. Criminals are by nature all liars. Police run a close second and the media outdo the both of us, so how can the general public believe a single word?
That is what I’m trying to say. Who created Chopper Read? Well, first of all, I did it myself with some big help of the police. Then, of course, the media got in for its chop, if you know what I mean. Chopper Read’s image is largely a media-created package. A virtual reality, multi-media package with no ears and a heap of tattoos, tied up in a bow.
But I wrapped the package for them, handed it to the police and we together handed it to the media. Dave the Jew – I could kill him off in the third page of my next book and the real Dave could scream to the wind. As far as the police, media and general public would be concerned, the Jew would be dead.
That’s how easy it is to build a legend, then to kill one off. It’s like writing characters in and out of television scripts, except that it’s real life. I plant the seed, I can chop the tree. Within the criminal world, the lie is everything. The gun is only a tool used to support the lie – once you understand that you begin to understand the insane psychology of it all.
Chopper Read is who and what you think he is because he told you he is. Others have confirmed my reality because I told them it was so. Maybe I don’t exist at all. How many of you have seen me in the flesh? Only a few dozen people of the hundreds of thousands who have read the books and seen the movie.
They made the movie about my life based on what I wrote. Okay, the movie is pretty well true – a few murders, a shooting or two and a bit of a huff and puff, but hardly the stuff legends are built on.
But if I can do it, what about the truth of other legends? What about reputations. Is it all just a lie? No, of course it isn’t, but for all that, in the criminal world the lie is vital. It is the glue that holds it all together.
The crims who have stolen this book will begin to understand but I suspect the rest of you will be struggling with it. Bear with me, it will all come together in the end.
People like things black and white. They don’t like to be taken through the valley of the shadow of grey and no one likes to be told that what they believe isn’t true or even isn’t quite true. People want to believe in life after death. That’s why the Bible is the best-selling book in the world.
No-one really believes it but with all their heart they want to believe it. So, too, with crime, the criminals, police, media and general public. They want to believe that a story, a legend, a reputation or a myth is true and so they dismiss anything other than what they want to believe. It is a mental, emotional and psychological weakness in all of us. I just know about it and can therefore use it against the rest. No-one is immune.
Now I’ve given everyone a nice headache, let us move along.
*
AFTER the 1987 Jika Jika fire in Pentridge Prison, in which five inmates died, the Russell Street bombing gang, along with myself and a handful of other maximum-security inmates, were moved back to the old H Division, my old home.
Believe this or not. I don’t care. The police were spending a fortune on witness protection for the main crown witness, a former member of my old overcoat gang, a weasel we booted out for cowardice in the face of the enemy, Paul Kurt Hetzel.
He has a full name change now and is living in a supposedly secret location interstate – so secret I could find him in the time it would take me to say Dave the Jew.
The police believed that the Russell Street bombers and their friends and contacts had the power to have Hetzel killed in 1988 – or was it 1989, I forget – but as their trial was under way I was approached by two members of the gang to see if I could arrange a handgun. Could I arrange a handgun? Could the Pope find some rosary beads?
Of course, I could arrange a handgun with a phone call. The code for handgun back then among my own contacts was Frankie. Could you get Frankie to meet so and so on Saturday morning etc etc. I wasn’t told why they wanted the handgun and ammo but you wouldn’t need to be a big thinker to work it out. It would cost a thousand dollars.
They didn’t have a thousand dollars, so no handgun. So let’s look at that, shall we. The police were spending a million or more on protecting Paul Kurt Hetzel and his de facto along with other witnesses from a gang and their friends and criminal contacts which, between the lot of them, couldn’t come up with a thousand dollars between them.
For a grand, maybe the history of the bombing would have been rewritten, or maybe the prosecution would have been blown to the shithouse.
I’ve never mentioned this before as I didn’t want to embarrass Craig Minogue, aka Fatty or Slim, who had done me a big favour in killing Alex Tsakmakis. But it was all years ago and, to prove my point, I will tell this story.
You see, as a direct result of disinformation and the psychology of fear, the Russell Street bombing gang were being treated like Mafia bosses in an Italian prison. It was widely believed they had vast criminal power and contacts.
However, in truth, they didn’t have a popgun or a grand between the lot of them. Now the disinformation was being put about by the crown witnesses to bolster their own situation with the police. The police in turn handed the same fearful disinformation to the media. The psychology of criminal fear used by the bombing gang itself was in the form of the bombing attack on police headquarters in Russell Street.
Everyone believed these blokes were the Aussie version of the fucking IRA, but in reality the whole gang would have run a poor second to the Bananas in Pyjamas. You could have put the star witnesses in a motel room in St Kilda, with a neon sign out the front flashing the words ‘Crown Witness Motel’ and the Russell Street bombers would not have had the criminal clout to organise a rock tossing contest through the motel windows.
That is the fact of the matter, but the fiction and the psychology of fear kept several teams of police busy 24 hours a day for several years, costing a fortune protecting witnesses from a phantom – a gang of wombats who couldn’t organise a three-seated shithouse without getting one of the pans blocked up.
I won’t make any friends by saying this, not that I ever had any friends to start with, just a couple of greedy publishers with a dodgy laptop and a lot of orthodontist bills.
Fatty Minogue is a good bloke who did me a big favour when he opened up Alex’s head but he is no Dr No, believe me.
You might be wondering how I can say that someone like Minogue is a good bloke. Here is a lesson in prison politics for the uninitiated. You don’t make too many judgments about what people have done on the outside; it is how they behave on the inside that matters.
Sure, I might have put the occasional broom handle up the bottom of the (very) odd rapist if they deserved it. It was a hobby of mine, a little like stamp collecting.
Of course, I did not like child molesters and such like, but it was not my job to be the judge of all the filth that floated into my division.
You make and then break alliances to keep control of the division. You are surrounded by some very seriously dangerous people (and that’s just the prison warders) so you need soldiers to protect the General’s back.
Churchill had no time for Stalin, either, but was prepared to back him when Hitler invaded Russia. He said he would make a pact with the Devil if the Devil was prepared to have a sneak go at Hitler. That’s what jail is like.
An enemy of your enemy is a friend. It’s been true for thousands of years, and will be for thousands more.
Alex Tsakmakis was a millionaire and a killer. He chucked a professional runner named Bruce Walker in the bay in 1978. Walker was a good runner, but not much of a swimmer, which was no surprise given that he was trussed up in chicken wire at the time.
Tsakmakis then set fire to Barry Robert Quinn in Jika Jika in 1984. Quinn had baited him about his girlfriend. It was a dumb move by Bazza. Alex squirted him with glue and then flicked matches at Barry. Whoosh! Barry was burnt alive. Not a good way to go. And the scorched smell was around for days.
There was a death notice the next day that was supposed to come from Alex saying, ‘Sorry, we always stuck together.’ Call me a cynic but I reckon there was a touch of ‘blue’ humour in that one.
I stabbed Alex in the neck once, while he was reading the Financial Review in the exercise yard. He wasn’t too tough when he was screaming around with blood pissing out where his collar used to be. He always was a pain in the n… Listen, for under 20 bucks you can cop the odd bad pun.
After that, Alex and I became allies, even though he hated me. We had another dangerous opponent so we stuck together. Remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But, much later, after Minogue joined the division, I heard that Alex had put a $7000 contract out on me. Now, that was a lot of money inside – for that sort of cash, I would nearly have done it myself.
I was saddened. Our alliance was over – although Alex didn’t know it. He came to me with the plan to kill big Craig. He had a leather punch spike he wanted to drive into Craig’s brain.
I warned Fatty Minogue about the attack. The big fella was to lose so much weight he was called Slim. Should have been called Jenny Craig Minogue.
When Alex went into the yard Craig was waiting with a couple of gym weights in a pillow case. He wasn’t looking for a workout. He swung them around and turned Alex’s brains to mashed potato.
I sat in my cell having a smoke. Sometimes Generals don’t have to fire the bullets, just move in the troops.
Slim was my friend. We both are still alive. Alex is dead. That’s how it works.
Churchill and Stalin. The Poms had no time for the Frogs, and vice versa, but they fought together in two world wars against the Hun. Enough lessons from the past.
If you don’t get it by now, pay for cable TV and watch the history channel.
*
IT is 7 July, 2000, as I sit at the kitchen table. Before we moved the kitchen table to where it is now, we hung Victor, our canary, in his cage from the ceiling. Now I get canary seed, water and feathers fluttering down on me as I write.
The Chopper movie is about to launch next month and the media frenzy is heating up. I received a nice letter from Eric Bana and some nice offers from all of those honest media people who don’t pay criminals. Renee Brack has made an appearance in my movie. They rang and asked me if I’d mind if she put her head in on it.
I told them I’ve got no problem with her head. No pun intended. Renee was a good scout and she always came prepared. But there were many other media types who dangled their careers off the end of my criminal record.
Let me put it another way. The amount of non-event, all dreams, no talent media bums that have latched on to me to get themselves started is astonishing.
They forget and so do the public, but the bloke with no ears has done more for more people than a lot of people realise or would like to confess to. Good luck to Renee Brack. I hope her bit part in my movie kicks her on.
The media ring me with ‘Chopper this’ and ‘Chopper that’. They come down to see me. They want photographs and autographs. The girls of the media strut in to see poor old Mark as if they are on the cat walk. All legs and push-up bras.
Then the cameras go on. Gone are the winks, the throaty laughs and the UDLs. Now it’s hair in a bun, judgmental comments about money from crime and the poor victims. Blah blah blah.
It’s all a show and I’m the dancing bear. I don’t mind because every time they slag me my book sales go up. The more they pretend to hate me the more the public want to know what’s going on.
I suspect the movie will enter the Kubrick world of A Clockwork Orange and be remembered by people who have never even seen it.
Billy the Texan once said to me that I was without a shadow of a doubt the greatest psychological manipulator of the media in Australian criminal history, but the same people dismiss me as not much of a crook compared to their great selves, of course.
My idea of a successful criminal isn’t much different from a successful anything else: someone who ends up with wealth, power, fame and long life.
Few crooks gain power, very few gain fame and even fewer gain long life. So a crook who has gained wealth, power, fame and long life is the winner – no contest.
Good crooks are never known. They have power and money without the fame. Serial killers get the fame with no power and no money and, usually, a lifetime behind bars. Violent criminals have a certain power, but only until they lose their strength, then they either reform or die. Some just get out of jail and become hairdressers like William John O’Meally.
I had fame, power and not much money. I can tell you that writing about crime is a hell of a lot better than committing it. That’s why crime reporters tend to live longer than the criminals they write about. Except if they die of mixed grill and beer poisoning.
I’m a forward thinker. I’m not so worried about today’s opinion but of tomorrow’s and I suspect new generations will view this no-eared freak with a kinder heart than the mice who roar at me today. History has shown us that.
*
SPEAKING of mice, one of Beethoven’s critics from the media, a name I forget, contacted a former Victorian Police Detective Inspector who, in turn, rang me. As a favour to the former inspector I rang the mouse, or mousette. She was doing an article on me, the movie and so on.
I tried to explain that all the money that was due to me from the movie had already been signed over to a children’s hospital cancer foundation, but she didn’t want to know this as the fact that I’d already given the movie money away to charity flew in the face of her ‘how criminals make money from crime’ articles. Again, it’s an example of how the truth is never believed. People would rather believe the lie.
All she wanted was a black story and so she didn’t want a white answer. She only wanted the legend, the myth and the lie – and anything that wavered from what she had already planned on writing was, to her, a lie.
She intended to turn her version into reality by printing it, then it would become the ‘truth’. That is, the truth to a vast number of her unsuspecting readers.
I was too polite to mention that the only person making any money at the time was her.
I wasn’t being paid for the interview and she was getting plenty. I’ve seen a lot of hypocrisy and dishonesty and a lot of rackets in my time, but I’ve never seen more hypocrisy and dishonesty than there is in the media racket. They’re geniuses at it.
*
I ONCE said to my publisher many years ago that when you jump on the horse you flog her ’til she drops. It is now July 2000 and, as I write this, the media storm over the Chopper movie is already beginning to break.
I said to my publisher over the phone, ‘Get off the piss and edit this book.’ Then I said, ‘Remember that horse I first mentioned to you – well, we are standing in the barn and the horse has bolted and no bastard is riding it.’
It’s too late, Frankenstein’s monster has left the castle and we are all hiding under the table. The myth that we created has escaped into the world of reality and nothing and no one can bloody well put the genie back in the bottle. Have I mixed enough metaphors for you? I don’t even know what a metaphor is but it sounds good, doesn’t it?
It was then that the psychology that I’ve often tried to explain truly hit home. It was like when I was in the Pink Palace, Risdon Prison in Tasmania. Inmates all around me are cutting off their ears, and there are riots, sit ins and stop works, suicides and unexplained insanity and the only quiet, polite prisoner in the jail was the only one they never blamed for any of it.
But I was the only one who could control it. That was mass psychology and you had to have been in a prison for many years to understand the thinking and to be able to use the psychology to your own gain. To control any situation, even a mass situation like a prison population, you must use psychology, not violence or force of arms. Yes indeed, violence and force of arms is a vital tool, but that’s all. Psychology is the guiding force.
Violence, or the threat of it, is the bullet. But the gun that directs the force is the psychology of fear.
No-one ever believed that the mass hysteria of a whole prison population could be caused by one man.
They were frightened of me yet, at the same time, not frightened. That is one of the greatest tricks. They know you are dangerous, but they don’t feel any personal danger, as I’ve always allowed the other fellow to have his ego and to feel superior to myself physically, yet inferior to me mentally.
As long as I allowed the other fellow his feeling of physical superiority, while maintaining his subconscious sense of mental and emotional inferiority, he would do what I wanted.
He would use his physical strength to get the approval of the man he believed was his mental superior.
It is not a perfect science and some of those I tried to control could turn on me. I’ve been attacked countless times but it was always my reaction afterwards that enabled me to turn an attacker into a friend.
I stabbed Alex and later we became allies. He turned on me and he became dead. I don’t know what Freud would think about it but his ink blots wouldn’t have mattered much inside H Division, although I must admit there was touch of what Sigmund called penis envy when I dropped my strides. The quickest way to analyse an inmate in there was to hit him in the head with a spade, an experiment allegedly performed by a large, no-eared man on one Richard Mladenich. But I digress.
It’s all very Dr B.F. Skinner, the Black Prince of the 20th century on the dark side of behavioural psychology. He carried out behavioural science tests on his own daughter, what we call mind games. She later took her own life, casting Skinner into the sin bin. However, his evil genius in relation to the study of mass psychology and behavioural science has been used by various governments during warfare.
The CIA used Skinner’s thinking during the middle and later stages of the Cold War. Make the other fellow doubt himself is the first rule and, since all persons are riddled with self doubt, Skinner’s psychological method for breaking down the emotional strength of the enemy was popular with the Cold War warriors. It’s like all great science, simple to put into practice – if you have the weapons.
Enough said, however, on B.F. Skinner. I spent 17 years reading his work. Do you think I am about to toss that sort of in-depth study into a paperback? A teacher asks the question, the student provides the answer. The fact that I have provided some answers for you doesn’t mean that I intend to provide them all. If I was to tell you all the secrets it would be like giving a loaded gun to a child. The consequences could be bloody.
I was big and tough, with a taste for violence and a capacity to take pain. But what made me different was that I was prepared to learn from history. While the others were watching the races, I was reading about the great generals and their battles. I was able to use their lessons in the Australian underworld.
I would smile and behave the fool but I would always remember what I had learned and use it against my enemies and, sometimes, my friends. You must remember that my enemies were often not that smart. Many of them thought the Battle of the Bulge was a fight in a strip club.
But I was just one of the biggest fish in a small septic pond. We were all dying by degrees. Many of my type were murdered, others died from their wounds, while others just rotted to become shadows of their former selves while in prison.
I retired, not to the front bar of some pub, but to the library where I began to write. It was not part of a master plan. We thought we might get one book out.
It became a best seller. Now this is the tenth, and I would suspect the last, book I will write. My life has been made into a movie. It is all unbelievable.
The truth is, I got away with murder in the underworld and I got away with murder in the literary world.
I look into the fire and wonder why. Then I remember I will have to clean up all the ash in the morning.