LET’S do lunch. I found myself sitting by the Hobart waterfront in the sunshine with my pain in the neck, loud mouth, big noting, larger than life, old aged playboy, over-the-hill yuppie, millionaire-nightclub-owner mate, Shane Farmer.
The Tasmanian premier, Jim Bacon, looked fried as he was doing some sort of TV interview not too far away. As our lunch ended, Farmer, as always, left me to pay the bill.
As I counted out the cash the media and TV people were getting set to interview Honey’s husband. That’s right, Jim Bacon’s wife’s name is Honey. Don’t you love it?
There are about a thousand different comic remarks one could make about any lady named Honey, but if you add Bacon on the end of it, that number blows out to about 2000. As Farmer and myself walked towards the media people and the premier we could hear the whispers ‘it’s Chopper Read.’
The premier ducked to one side to get out of our way. I slapped him on the shoulder and said in a voice that could be well heard, ‘You’re a credit to the party, Jim.’ He gave a nervous laugh and the media crews cracked up – or were on crack. I couldn’t be sure. As I walked away, I said to Shane Farmer in a stage whisper that could be heard back in the mainland: ‘How did he get into the ALP. We would have shot the wombat 20 years ago.’ It was a joke, Jim.
Jim Bacon looks like a heavyweight on TV yet when I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the bone structure he definitely felt like a bantamweight to me. They say TV puts pounds on.
Thank God I’m in top nick.
We then headed off to Charles Touber’s million-dollar, luxury beach-side, true-believer, ALP-to-his-boot-straps mansion and spoke deeply about the sad plight of the working class by the swimming pool. Need I say more? I don’t think I should.
Just because you rooted a few gangsters doesn’t mean you are one. Not a very nice saying, but true. One thing I can’t cop is some wombat whose only credentials are that he or she knew or knows a few crooks writing books about crime and punishment.
I’m told my book, the first one I wrote, is being repackaged and along with a collections of photos is to be released in the UK about the same time as the Chopper movie. It is big in South Africa, but they’re mad; a hit in New Zealand, but they’re poor. I have been profiled in magazines and newspapers in France, America, Canada, South Africa and Bongo Congo. International fame at last. And well deserved too.
Michele Bennett is the unsung heroine of the movie. She’s the girl with more guts than many crooks I know, who stuck with the project for years to produce the bloody thing. I hope she makes a big quid. I wish I could too, but then I can’t get paid because I’m an old crook and they’re not allowed to make money from anything but being brickies’ labourers for rich folks, I guess.
She sent me a book called Ronnie Kray – Sorted by Kate Kray, published by Blake Publishing Ltd of 3 Bramber Court, 2 Bramber Road, London W149PB, England.
As I read through this collection of old facts and so-called new facts – I would be the last to call anyone a liar – I came to her last sentence. It read like this: ‘I have now started a new chapter in a new house and am busy writing a new book about the subject I know best. “Tough Guys” What else?’
Well, I’ve got a sentence for Kate. ‘You ain’t never shot no-one in ya life darling, so piss or get off the pot.’
I used to love the Kray twins, but reading these penny dreadful books put together by the various general dogs bodies who knew them, I’m starting to reconsider. I was shooting people in the legs at the age of 15. I carried out my first professional paid murder at 18 and, not to put too fine a point on it, after the third killing Dave the Jew said to me ‘Well, Chop Chop, we beat the twins’ record.’ I don’t think he was talking about the Bedsers. (They’re twins who played cricket, you fool.)
I was 23 by then and it was five murders, not three, however the Kray brothers remained my heroes. It makes me almost vomit to read this latest Kray brothers crap. Blake Publishing will be handling my book. Thank goodness, I will be raising the literary standards of the old country. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Captain W.E. Johns and Chopper Read. Who would have thought?
I read a book and if I can pick out one thread then the whole book unravels as a collection of very clever, well put together stories which I accept are yarns and not facts. And I only stick to the facts in my books. Don’t I?
I loved the Krays, not for their toughness or their brutality, which to me was little more than school yard nonsense. I loved them because they were the first crims outside America to adopt the Hollywood style of packaging. They took nothing and created an international English legend. To write yourself into the pages and fabric of a nation’s history using little more than smoke and mirrors and bullshit is to be commended. They are the true and perfect example of the Psychology of Fear. They made other people believe they were dangerous using the Psychology of Fear.
Let’s be honest, half the Kray firm was made up of semi-crooked businessmen and after-dark club owners and the other half was made up of psycho shirtlifters and between the bunch of them they whacked out about three men. They reigned for about 15 years and killed just three men. I’ve known card carrying pacifists who have killed more.
Any gang running around Melbourne who only killed three men in approximately 15 years wouldn’t get their names written on the back of a toilet door. So yes, I do admire the Krays for their showmanship and their brilliant use of psychology to get legend status but I wish their wives, girlfriends and toilet cleaners would stop writing bloody books about them. It’s starting to get quite depressing. What would they have been known as in Australia. The Yabbie Brothers?
*
DAVID McMillan was one of the first major heroin traffickers to be arrested in Australia. Charismatic, young, confident and from a privileged background, McMillan was arrested in 1981 joint police taskforce, code named Aries.
He employed a former British SAS soldier to try to fly a helicopter into Pentridge as part of an escape plot. It sounded like a fantasy – until it was successfully done in Queensland years later.
McMillan was sentenced to 17 years jail but was released in 1991 declaring he would make a fresh start.
But two years later he was arrested in Thailand and again convicted of heroin trafficking. But McMillan always had money and dash. He was later to escape. His precise whereabouts is not known to police, but there are people in Melbourne who are believed to speak to him regularly in the United Kingdom.
*
DAVID McMILLAN was a yuppie millionaire bum. When I first knew him we were both in the maximum security Jika Jika division Pentridge back in the early 1980s. He fell out with Alex Tsakmakis and put a contract on his head.
Mad Alex, a millionaire himself, simply doubled the amount and McMillan found himself on protection along with his yuppie mate, Michael Sullivan. Alex Tsakmakis was not a man to be messed with and he could buy or sell McMillan and his mate, Sullivan, out of petty cash. Also, Tsakmakis was building himself a Pentridge power structure. However, it was rumoured that McMillan and Sullivan were bribing screws, even very senior ones. Their power structure was based on cash and they were willing to spend. Alex Tsakmakis was too cheap to pay a proper bribe. His idea of a bribe was to tell whoever what he wanted and if it wasn’t carried out he’d spend five, 10 or 20 grand getting your wife, sister or mother shot.
Sullivan could have represented Australia as a pole vaulter. I couldn’t see the purpose of the sport, although I myself would occasionally run around with a big stick. But, I digress.
Michael once asked the prison authorities for a pole so he could practice. Even they twigged when they found he could clear six metres, and some of the walls were about five metres. What he lacked in brains he made up in stupidity. McMillan and Sullivan were way out of their criminal depth tangling with the mad Greek but they did survive their sentence via bribes and corruption and being classed as high risk protection prisoners. I promptly forgot them as non events. Not worthy of note until people mentioned them to me recently, asking if I remembered anything about them.
My reaction was: ‘What? Those bums? You want me to waste my time writing about those semi faggot, lah de dah, yuppie arse wipes?’
So here goes. (Get on with it. – Ed.).
*
WHEN Dave the Dog got out of the Bangkok Hilton on a hot August night, to quote an old Neil Diamond song, no-one had ever busted out of Klong Prem Prison in recent memory. This was 1996. McMillan, aged 40, then was in a cell with four Thai inmates on the first floor of the joint. He used acid to weaken the bars, broke them, then squeezed his skinny half-junkie body through the bars and lowered himself to the ground using electrical flex. He got past the prison dining hall and a ‘paid to sleep’ guard, got a paid-for bamboo ladder, got over the wall, cut barbed wire with a cutter, also paid for and waiting for him.
He gets through electrified cables unseen by any of the guards, undoubtedly paid to look the other way, and with a paid helper in the shadows ran to the canal and swam through a river of Klong Prem shit and vomit to a waiting car and vanished.
I have got no idea why Thailand is still poor after all the money they got out of Macca. His bribe money would have kept a small country afloat.
You have to pay for cars, ladders, cutters and Old Spice to cover the smell of a dip in poo river.
All hell broke loose (shock, horror, he’s gone!) Big deal. He remains the only Westerner to this day to escape from the ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Or so the story goes.
I’ve heard other yarns that various UK criminals and American Mafia guys have been driven out of the prison to the airport and had all their paper work destroyed for $US20,000 cash which, in Bangkok, is a King’s Ransom. Would go all right in Tassie, I’ve got to tell you. So I don’t place much faith in the yarn that McMillan won when other men lost. Klong Prem is a turnstile, cash prison (no Eftpos), meaning if you don’t have the cash you rot or die, but if you have the cash and it goes into the hands of the right police and military personnel you are on your way.
For 20 to 25 grand you will get a ride home – or a bullet in the head on the way to the airport. (With any luck you get frequent fliers with that, not Ansett I hope).
After the escape cash has been handed over. The smart idea is to place five grand in hand and 15 grand after the police and military clear you through the airport – which, of course, would cost another few grand to sweeten the airport police and military personnel. They are separate units with their own bribe ideas. That includes GST (Greedy, Slippery Thais).
I don’t know about you but I’m bored already. I’d rather talk about the little Greek babe Katerina and her telling me with a wink, ‘How come all the good looking guys are married?
I have the funny feeling that Miss 160 IQ Katerina was playing me like a fine violin. I would have preferred she played the pink oboe. Anyway, back to McMillan. Yes, I know, bugger McMillan, and let’s hear more about the little Greek head spinner, but this is a crime book and I have an obligation to include these shit heads. (Mark, please get your mind out of the gutter and back on the job, or should that be get your mind back in the gutter and out of the job? – Ed.)
Caulfield Grammar has punched out its fair share of freaks, such as the late Christopher Skase and that singer Nick Cave, and then there is David Peter McMillan. Like Skase (before the carked it), he is no longer in Australia. Or, like Nick Cave, he may be no longer on the planet Earth.
He faces three years jail time in Australia and the death sentence in Thailand if he is ever caught. But he’s gone. McMillan was a dreamer and a schemer with a restless creative spirit drawn to the dark side. He loved fast money and drugs. He was smart, ambitious and a heroin user.
He was in his early 20s when he got in on the ground floor of heroin dealing. He was a gifted photographer, cameraman and writer with enough contacts in the Melbourne television industry to do well.
But heroin got him where he wanted to get to quicker. He was a good talker and even got involved in gemstone smuggling. What’s the use of having a bum like a bucket if ya can’t jam a half pound of heroin up it and a small bag of uncut gems. No doubt about those old Caulfield Grammar boys.
I guess ya can’t spend the last three years at school being humped up the clacker by half the footy team and most of the cricket team without using a somewhat stretched bum to some good advantage. I won’t bore you with this wombat’s legal hassles. If my publishers wish to include a footnote they can. (What, us work? No way. – Ed)
Anyway, McMillan left Caulfield Grammar to go to Prahran High or the other way around. Mad Charlie went to Prahran High and lived in Caulfield. Mad Charlie was a lot younger but could still punch the guts out of every kid in the school. I don’t know the details but McMillan always claimed to know Mad Charlie and Mad Charlie always said ‘Yeah, that yuppie poof, you watch him. He’s on his way to a million bucks.’
I said, ‘So what?’
Mad Charlie continued talking. I should have known he had a plan. He may have been mad and but he wasn’t silly. That’s why he wasn’t called Silly Charlie. But I digress.
Charlie said, ‘When he’s rich we’ll have a million bucks and a dead fag in the boot of the car.’
It didn’t happen. The Macca is alive and Mad Charlie is dead so I suppose the pansy wins. And they say there is justice in the world. I would rather have one Mad Charlie by my side than ten drug rich, la-de-da types.
McMillan only worried about looking after himself. His girlfriend died in a fire at Fairlea women’s prison, and her family never forgave him. He got away. Good luck to him. If I saw him I would probably punch him and take ten grand for old time’s sake.
Yeah, he had charm, wit and style and he was a good looking bugger to boot and he had a sense of humour. He had glamour. He was a posh wide boy, a big noter. He was born a liar which means that fact and fiction didn’t matter, it was the story that counted. He created his own myth in 1973. He vanished from Caulfield Grammar and ended up at Taylor’s College and, quoting his friendship with a then 16-year-old Mad Charlie, became friendly with a former Marcellin College boy named Alphonse Gangitano who, as we all know, like Mad Charlie himself was later shot to death by some unnamed party who used to be a mate.
McMillan was never going to be a tough guy or a gunman. He was pure midnight express brains and polish, James Bond 006. Licensed to thrill, not kill, and drugs was where it was at.
Genius or not, his problem was the same as a lot of other moron crooks. When he kicked a goal he couldn’t help flashing it about. No matter how much money he made he tried like mad to spend it, which is a dead giveaway. He spent and spent – on houses, cars and expensive toys of every sort. Even wealthy people started to smell a rat and a cunning old former policeman who lived next door down near Brighton somewhere smelt more than a rat. He smelt a heroin dealer.
McMillan demanded that anyone working for him should maintain a low profile yet he himself lived the life of the rich and famous. No expense was ever spared.
McMillan’s girlfriend, Clelia Vigano, was one of the beautiful daughters of a hotelier and restaurateur called Ferdie Vigano. Clelia’s grandfather, Mario Vigano, had married a European countess and was the proprietor of the original Mario’s restaurant in Exhibition Street, Melbourne. A very posh establishment in its day. The family and the restaurant were both Melbourne institutions. I didn’t eat there. Perhaps it was because I didn’t wear a tie. It would have nothing to do with my lack of ears and my fetching tatts. That would be discrimination.
Clelia was attracted by dangerous men, bad boys, but with McMillan all she got was a heroin needle. The lifestyle they shared cost McMillan years in prison and Clelia her life.
By 1979 McMillan had teamed up with Micky or Michael Sullivan, another looks good, feels good, talks good loser with a heroin habit. Sullivan couldn’t fight his way out of the ladies’ toilet no matter how good a pole vaulter he was.
Together they were a pair of snobs. Arrogant, paranoid shits.
*
HALF EDUCATED CHOPPER
“PROPHET AND POPE”
LIKES TO BURN DOWN THEIR HOUSES
AND RIP OFF THEIR DOPE
GOOD BLOKE THIS CHOPPER
NO BRAINS AND NO EARS
LIKES TO MIX WITH THE COPPERS
BUYING THEIR BEERS
ILLITERATE CHOPPER
“POET AND TOFF”
AN INCREDIBLE SHITMAN
WE’LL BE GLAD WHEN HE’S OFF
IMBECILE CHOPPER
“VERMIN AND PEST”
YOU’LL NEED MORE THAN A .410
AND A BULLETPROOF VEST
A HALFWIT OUR CHOPPER
HIS MEMOIRS YOU SEE
SHOW HE’S A MORON
WITH A HEART LIKE A PEA
POOR DELUDED CHOPPER
WILL NEVER HAVE ANY CLASS
LIVING IN A FANTASY WORLD
AND TAKING IT IN THE ARSE
HE THINKS HE’S A HERO
AND TO ME THAT’S A PUZZLE
‘CAUSE THE ONLY THINGS MISSING
ARE A COLLAR AND MUZZLE.
I don’t know if Jason wrote this, but if you’re so tough how come the bloke who whacked your brother is still alive? Writing nasty letters to me won’t get the job done. Continue with the poetry, you have talent. Love, Chopper.