From the Inside: Chopper 1 (13 page)

In Melbourne we have the shifty deal. I think it is far more honest.

THE SHIFTY DEAL

The Australian Courts don’t hold no grudge,
A nod’s as good as a wink,
To a blind Judge,
No need for cash, the briefs been paid,
All praise the name of Legal Aid,
The Crown is hoping for an early night,
No need to struggle,
No need to tight,
‘Look boys I’ll drop this,
You plead to that’,
And all home in time,
To feed the cat,
No cash needed here,
Nor money down,
Forget the Yanks,
This is Melbourne Town,
‘I’ll do this for you,
You do that for me,
We can sort this out,
Just wait and see’,
The courts, crooks and coppers all know the feel,
Of the classic Aussie shifty deal.

Chapter 14

The plastic Godfathers

‘Freddy is a thickset, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man with the physical strength of a small bull — and the courage of a rice bubble’.

THERE are certain criminals who get around Melbourne with big reputations thinking they are the mafia. Most of them are jokes. They bore me to tears. Their idea of mafia is to wear dark glasses in Lygon Street.

If you stand on a corner in Lygon Street wearing dark glasses and slip-on shoes and there’s more than two of you, then you’re in the mafia. It’s just ridiculous. These plastic crims, with their car phones and coke habits, they try to follow anything on American television. They aren’t tough at all.

There is one silly fat fool I’ve known for years, and as long as there’s a crim to sell down the drain neither he nor any of that Carlton Crew will do a day’s jail.

It is well-known in criminal circles that there are four main police stations in Melbourne: St Kilda Road, Russell Street, William Street . . . and Lygon Street. More crims have been given up by that lot of would-be pretenders than in the rest of Melbourne. So much for the mafia code of silence. They wouldn’t know anything about it. If that fat plastic Godfather ever ended up in here he would get a welcome he would never forget.

You are dealing with crims today who ‘fought’ their way through the back streets of ‘tough’ suburbs like Lower Templestowe, North Balwyn and East Ivanhoe. I was brought up in Thomastown. We thought the people in West Heidelberg were posh because they had sewerage.

The crims today come from quite affluent backgrounds. It’s shocking when you think about it. There is no excuse for some of them being inside. Some of them have matriculated, some have been to university. It’s drugs that have got them here, you understand.

It’s not the same anymore. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life mixing with this lot. Honestly, there are crims in here in their 20s who talk about the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
How can you spend your time with people like that?

The hard crims were the men with the dash to fight each other in the field of combat; they were the ones respected in the underworld. But now it is the man with drug connections. Some weak insipid, effeminate, little character calls the shots.

The number of crims who have
Scarface
 on video at home is ridiculous. The Carlton Crew all have
Godfather One, Two
and
Three
on video. They have been talking about taking a contract out on me: $15,000 down and $15,000 when the job is completed. These so-called contracts are generally made in loud voices and in public, at card games or late at night at nightclubs.

The aim is to impress the crowd and to frighten me. All I can do is pass on the words of an old mentor and one of the world’s really hard men: ‘If the mafia is so tough, why don’t they have a branch office in Belfast?’ The bad blood between me and the Carlton Crew is a thing of the past as far as I am concerned. They can keep their paranoid ways. I know that some criminals have been trying to play both sides off against each other for well over four years.

It has been a classic case of the mice trying to manipulate the lions. We will never all walk down Lygon Street hand in hand but the days of blood feuding are over. Simply because I am walking away. As for the plastic gangsters, they wouldn’t know how close they came to learning firsthand what real blood and guts underworld warfare was like, on the receiving end. If things had turned out a little differently in 1987 quite a few of them might have been caught in Operation Wog Fry, the plan I had to torch Lygon Street with petrol.

*

To give you an example of some of the nitwits who are supposed to be ‘crime bosses’ I will give you a profile on one of the men who is supposed to be a Godfather.

I have always known him as ‘Freddy the Wog’. He is a thickset, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with the physical strength of a small bull and the courage of a rice bubble. He is connected in illegal gambling, speed factories, massage parlours and escort services. He has a fearful reputation as a man who will put a contract out on anyone if they cross him. But in my humble opinion, he couldn’t organise a hit on his next door neighbour’s cat.

He started off as a street fighter in Brunswick and got a reputation as a tough man, gunfighter, standover man and nightclub gangster around Melbourne in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He made that reputation with violence against females, taking their money and beating harmless drunks half to death. He would never appear in pubs and clubs without a small army of two-bob tough guys and hangers-on to back him up. With a gun he was a razzle dazzle boy, pistol whipping drunks and weak people, pulling out the gun to impress the ladies. In the early days he only had a replica; it wasn’t until later that he actually owned a real one.

Freddy’s right hand men were a half-crazy Albanian named Machine Gun Charlie who, in truth, never owned a machine gun, and Frankie Long Nose, a two bob mafia pretender. Freddy’s hero was the American gangster, Al Capone, and Freddy loved people to call him ‘Mr Capone’. Freddy was another one of these nitwits who read every gangster and mafia book ever written and tried to live in a mafia fantasy land, later encouraging his younger brothers to do the same. I punched on twice with Freddy, once at the Hard Rock Cafe and the other time at Johnny’s Green Room. Let me tell you, for all his giant reputation, I have met school girls who could beat him in a fight. In the world of really hard men, his name and those of his brothers don’t rate a mention.

I once stuffed this idiot head first into a large litter bin outside a Melbourne nightclub. He was a pansy then and money hasn’t improved him. He has got into drugs now and is one of the biggest names in the heroin industry. He is hero worshipped by a large number of young Italian criminals, and involved with criminal crews in several states. The Carlton Crew in Melbourne is but one. Yet he prefers to live interstate for safety reasons. He may be rich now, but to me he is still just another limp-wristed pansy gangster.

Freddy is the prime example of how money and drugs can turn a mouse into a monster. Personally, I would like to have grabbed Freddy, kidnapped him and introduced him to the old blow torch. However, he became wealthy while I was in jail during the early 1980s, and he was living out of the state when I got out. Why he hasn’t gone on the missing list already is a mystery to me. He is very smart, but I have never met a coward who didn’t have his fair share of rat cunning. Meanwhile Freddy has the money to live out his Al Capone fantasy. Walter Mitty spends a lot of time at Freddy’s house, believe me.

A lot of men in jail are there because of Freddy. But, although he’s such a big operator, he’s not in jail. The truth is Freddy has been the target for assorted police forces for ten years but he has survived the way most of them do. What he does is ‘create’ other drug lords for the police to grab. Freddy will provide top grade smack for up-and-comers, then remove himself and work through a middle man. The up-and-comers may start with a simple bag of smack, 28 grams or so. They cut the stuff six times and make their money. They get bigger and bigger until they too are major dealers. Each may sell a pound a week, all supplied through Freddy’s middle men. They then become police targets and can be given up before anyone gets too close to Freddy.

Freddy has made his money from them and these monkeys can be replaced. Many of them have only dealt through middle men and never know that Freddy is the power behind the scene. The police are happy because they have grabbed what they believe are one or two major dealers, and that takes the heat off Freddy. Some multi-million dollar drug bosses arrested, charged and convicted were Freddy’s monkeys and they didn’t even know it.

The term for this is the ‘swap-out’. When the police get close to Freddy he gives them the swap out; it has kept him out of jail for years. Two major drug dealers are in Pentridge now because of a swap-out. They were given up by a middle man who takes his orders from Freddy.

Freddy the Wog is really a self-made man. He gave himself the nickname, earned a reputation for violence based on nothing, and created an image for himself. He has risen to become one of the most powerful and feared drug lords in Australia, but in truth he is nothing but a paper tiger. He remains afloat by getting rid of his enemies by setting them up with the police. He is a skilled man at surviving by treachery.

*

Another major figure we will call Al is Lygon Street’s answer to Robert De Niro. He goes under many names: The Fairy Godfather, The Plastic Gangster, Melbourne’s Princess of Crime, the King of Paranoia and the Italian French Poodle. That’s right, I don’t like Al. I first met him when he was 19, pinching money out of girls’ handbags in nightclubs while the chicks were on the dance floor.

I’ve never heard of Al having a punch-on without having 10 or 12 helpers backing him up. He is a bully and he picks his mark. He will only fight if he can win. He started off as a bouncer at the two-up school; he has shot a few drunks in the leg at nightclubs and he has learnt how to run card games. He may be rich and he may be well-connected but the hole he will one day go into has already been dug.

He lives in fear, a prisoner of his own wealth. He is backed up by a private army of kick boxers, gunmen and bouncers, all with their hands out for money. The only one in that crew with guts and brains is the one called Mick, who has the sense not to shoot his mouth off.

Every time Al needs some advice he puts on
The Godfather
 movie to see how Marlon Brando did it. Once I went to say a friendly hello to him in a card game in Lygon Street — with a stick of gelignite. Funny thing, Al wouldn’t come out of the toilets for a chat.

This big clown may be a hero to a large part of the criminal world but personally I wouldn’t give him a job as a towel boy in a gay Turkish bath; he wouldn’t be tough enough. He is another of that crew who is the master of the swap-out, which is why he hasn’t been to jail.

Once I would have liked a full on war with this crew, but now I couldn’t care less. But if any of them try coming to Tasmania to look for me they’d better get one-way tickets, because they won’t be coming back.

*

One of the longest reigning and luckiest criminals in Melbourne would have to be the drug dealer known as The Tiger. I first met him when I was 16 in the Turana boys’ home when I did 4 months. The Tiger has come a long way since then and would now be a millionaire, owning houses and land in Newport, Williamstown and the south eastern suburbs. He buys houses and land like other men buy socks.

Tiger owns property in Lygon Street and is a financial partner in some of the illegal gambling haunts in that area. He is another member of the Carlton Crew. He relies on some of them for protection. He keeps large amounts of money in trust accounts held by certain suspect solicitors. He gambles heavily and likes to call himself a professional punter. He also breeds and fights American pit bull terriers and considers that good sport. He cuts the ears off all his dogs to give them that mean, clean cut look.

Tiger has a large collection of jewellery and has given me a solid gold ring with 32 diamonds in it. I never had to put The Tiger in the boot; he would toss money at me whenever he saw me. I once took a .32 revolver, put a slug in it, spun it, closed it, put it to my head and pulled the trigger — ‘click’. Then I put it to The Tiger’s head — ‘click’ again. He nearly fainted. I did, however, shoot one of his bodyguards once. That chap decided when he recovered that it would be in his best interests to resettle overseas — a wise move in these troubled times.

The Tiger had money everywhere. I once walked into his home and found $5000 in cash lying beside an electric heater. He had plenty and there was no need to torture him. He was physically weak. I was once offered $5000 to shoot him but I refused. He was paranoid, having more bodyguards than the Queen of England.

Why would I want to kill him when he was my own Golden Goose? I could get money out of The Tiger with just a phone call. He always carried between $5000 and $10,000 in $100 bills for spending money. He would give me $1000 or $2000 every time I would say hello to him, which is what I call good manners. He would also pinpoint other drug dealers for me to grab.

He once took me to the footy to see Footscray play the Sydney Swans. We were both a little pissed and standing near the fence. Naturally I was well armed even though it was just a day out. The Tiger pointed out Warwick Capper, who was on the field and only 30 feet away. The Tiger said ‘Chopper, put a bullet though that bastard’s kneecap and you can name your own price’. He was quite serious in his suggestion, but I just laughed it off. If I had been a little drunker at the time, who knows what could have happened?

The Tiger stays afloat by swapping-out his monkeys, the people who deal drugs with him. This is a trick which was taught to him by his idol, Freddy the Wog. The Tiger has invested his money so well that the drug world is just a hobby to him. He has never been to jail. However, a great many people who have blame the experience on being swapped-out by The Tiger.

He once put up a great amount of money to have me killed and the men who accepted the contract went straight to the race track and lost it. He once sat at his kitchen table with 60 grand in front of him and burst into tears because he could not get anyone to kill me. He may be an evil bastard, but he has his funny side and in one way, I kind of liked him.

Tiger is the king of smack in the western suburbs and while he is not a fighter or a gunman he is still dangerous. He is one of the most protected drug bosses in Australia. He is not a smartarse gangster. He tries very hard to be low key and to keep a low profile. He is probably the worst dressed and scruffiest looking millionaire in Melbourne. I used to tell him he should use some of his money on plastic surgery and a face lift because he is dog ugly. He has a head like a robber’s dog.

He prefers to spend his money on private detectives and electronic security. He keeps files on his enemies, his friends, other criminals and police. He has a collection of tape recordings which could start a Royal Commission. While I doubt that The Tiger will ever go to jail, I believe it is only a matter of time before he is collected by some headhunter. Of all the drug lords The Tiger is the shiftiest I have met. He is the classic cunning coward.