That teardrop was in memory of my grandmother, the tear I couldn’t shed, the tear I put there eternally, but when I was seeing that old lady afraid of me, I thought, ‘What the fuck? If that’s the reaction I get from other people I don’t need that.’
So I went to a tattoo shop and had them remove it. You can still see it a little bit but most of it is gone.
16. COLLEGE OF KNOWLEDGE INDUCTION
AUGUST 1986:
HM PENTRIDGE PRISON
Chris explains entering Pentridge at seventeen.
CHRIS:
The induction to the Big House from boys’ home was a terrifying change in dynamics, thrown in amongst hardened criminals at such a tender age.
Within weeks I was stabbed repeatedly in the yard by an adult.
This was, in part, my fault, as I mailed the seasoned junkie my intentions. Bad move by me.
I remembered this inmate from outside by the distinctive tattoo on his ear lobes.
Living in Footscray at the time, I’d run out of pot. It was the early hours of the morning, too late for my local dealer, so as a last resort I decided to catch a cab to St Kilda. I never used to venture out that way at all.
Approached by a shifty looking bloke asking if I wanted to score, I told him I did and gave him the money to buy an ounce of pot for me. He told me, wait here. So naïve I was, and he lashed me.
Now, spotting him in another yard on remand, I forewarned him of drama. I reminded him that he stole the cash and I called him into my yard to sort it out one on one.
He entered and when I began to throw punches he produced a shiv and stabbed me a number of times.
I never felt it at all. In fact, I got on top of him on the ground, pinned him down and bashed him with both hands, going crazy, adrenalin pumping, raining down blows on his face.
I disarmed him, and my friends then took the weapon from me before I stabbed him with it. The screw in the tower had now caught the scene, so we had to break it up before the screws ran in the yard to do a check.
He left bruised, I might say. I was bleeding, but patched myself up with sticky tape and toilet paper.
In the years to follow, this is something I come to experience time and time again.
PRISON SLANG: LESSON TWO
Hot watering – to throw the contents of a just-boiled kettle over someone
Put on show – to mock or humiliate in front of other inmates or guards
Gronk – an inmate who is less fortunate (has jail shoes not brand shoes), not part of the crew
Lag – to give information to the police or prison authorities: he lagged on other inmates to get favours from the prison governor; she lagged him to the coppers to get off her own charges
Shank, shiv – homemade knife (for stabbing other inmates)
Tool up – to obtain weapons
18. COLLEGE OF KNOWLEDGE 2
1986–88:
PRISON TOUR
Chris turns nineteen. His development continues in this brutal world.
OCTOBER 1986: B DIVISION
CHRIS:
A couple of months later I am again attacked in the compound [shared] exercise yard of B Division.
Four inmates break my jaw.
It’s tied to my history from Poplar House boys’ home: the bashing of another inmate is a power–control thing for the running of the place.
Breaking his nose catches up to me.
He is now in the compound with all his mates. And he wants to show me how he is now in control of the yard, that this is his territory not mine.
The favourite location for most assaults in the compound are the portables that house the table tennis and pool table, as no staff are able to monitor what’s unfolding inside.
Lured in, knowing full well what’s on their agenda, I am surrounded by the group. One pulls my head whilst another cheap-shots me with a blind side king hit, knocking me out and breaking my jaw.
I refuse to talk to the authorities about this. The Pentridge doctor issues a soft food diet and sick-in-cell chit for a few days.
I have to confront my assailants in the shared compound again, a harrowing ordeal. I am unable to describe the fear it instils in me.
Yet, scared kids in an adult population, surrounded by hardcore violence, we call it even.
*
Frank Waghorn, far bigger at 114 kilograms to my 70-something, older at about 36 years to my eighteen, a veteran prison fighter, bank robber and soon a murderer, attacks me in late December.
I defend myself by ‘hot watering’ him with a jug of boiled water, but this incident gets me transferred to H Division, aka Hell Division.
After the blue with Waghorn, prison staff are alarmed for my safety and send me to Hell for my own welfare. I refuse to sign any protection requests or safety concerns about this well-known and influential inmate. Waghorn is an old-school crook who has been in the prison system forever, and I am just a young kid.
I’m charged with assault and grievous bodily harm upon him, but after explaining my actions he gets charged with assault, due to my black shiner.
This is heard at Preston Magistrates Court in August the next year, where his charges are withdrawn due to my refusal to lag him. I am warned a number of times by the magistrate.
A contempt charge in the process.
I am extremely afraid.
JANUARY 1987:
HELL DIVISION
The staff are extremely violent. H Division is run as a military camp. It is just brutal. Brutal. Very boot camp. You have to pace, walk, salute. You have to hand your shoes in a certain way to the officers. You have to say ‘Sir’. If they feel that you are talking smart to them you get a clip over the head.
You have to roll your bedding just so: you can’t be lying on your bed during the day; that’s if you are allowed in the cell at all.
You can’t be relaxed. If they catch you lying on your bed they’ll bash ya. If you didn’t do the salute a certain way, they’ll bash ya.
No shoes are to be taken into the cell, so you take them off, place them out the front door and salute them. Crazy shit.
They have a cross painted in the centre of the yard. They escort you there and secure you. You have to walk to the cross, turn about face so you’re facing back towards the tower, the catwalk, and you have to wait there until the officer in the tower breaks you off.
On hot days they’ll leave you there. Twenty minutes, five minutes, one minute: you never know.
But if you break off before that officer gives you the authority he’ll radio through and send them in to bash you.
Therapy.
They are brutal, man.
Bastardisation at its worse and most extreme, with no exceptions to the rules, not even for the kids. No TV or anything like that.
We are bashed often and kept in a state of total fear and hate towards the staff. Sometimes they wear Ku Klux Klan hoods, as shown in photographs from Chopper Read’s book. It is an extreme world.
When I am not long eighteen and kept in this Hell alongside hardcore inmates, I meet a 19-year-old also named Chris. We get on okay.
Chris can’t cope with the fear and hate in H Division. He hangs himself.
So yesterday there was someone struggling in here and now he’s a corpse. They take his body out.
When word spreads that a teenager named Chris has hanged himself in H Division, my mum gets a stack of phone calls from people thinking it’s me. She panics until she finds her son is alive.
‘But my heart really goes out to the mother of Christopher Jergens,’ she tells one of the newspapers.
His death causes an uproar about how young he was, yet I am even younger – something my mum points out to the reporters.
‘Chris has only committed juvenile crimes, yet he’s in a division with mass murderers and armed robbers,’ she says.
*
The bullying and assaults inflicted on me by staff, the extreme atmosphere of threat and fear, foster a condition: me versus the blue un
iform; me versus agents of the state.
A solja in revolt.
FEBRUARY 1987:
BEECHWORTH PRISON
I am transferred to Beechworth, a medium-security prison where Ned Kelly and his supporters were held at one time.
But I have anger issues.
And Derek Percy is here: the paedophile child killer. I am disgusted that such a vile creature is walking amongst us in the wing and no one is doing anything about it. They are allowing it to be here – a position not shared by me.
So there is an incident.
It lives on the same bottom landing as I do and five odd cells across. I secure petrol from a lawnmower, a glass jar and rag, and wait for it to return from work.
Light the rag. Throw the Molotov in its cell, close the door, lock it from the outside, and wait for the crispy outcome.
But to my shock and horror some minutes later it bangs on its cell door.
From grand thoughts and images of it alight in its last death throes to disappointment when all the banging draws prison staff to its cell.
Opening up the door, its hand ventures out to pass them the intact Molotov.
It has carpet flooring in its cell; it was washing itself in there, having a bird bath – as it does not feel safe in the communal showers – when the cell door flew open and a balaclava-clad inmate lobbed a Molotov in. It jumped up in alarm, hit by the projectile.
But instead of the Molotov hitting the rear wall and exploding into fire as intended, the glass jar landed without breaking on the carpet, scorching the carpet but it used water from its tub to put it out. So it survives the barbecue and is moved due to this. Less proudly, I bash an inmate over a petty matter.
Prison staff hear him screaming for help over the console and start a walk of the tier. The cell next to where I am bashing him has a stereo on full bore but it can’t drown out the screaming and all the inmates have their heads out looking up to where it’s happening.
So the screws literally catch me red-handed, covered in blood, wearing gloves and a balaclava that they have to tear off.
Charged over this, I am sent back to Pentridge, where I stay in D Division until being transferred in early 1988 to Geelong Prison, a maximum-security jail that Barwon will replace.
JANUARY 1988:
GEELONG PRISON
I have never taken Rivotril pills before – zombie sedatives – but during my time at Geelong, I pop them like Tic Tacs.
I am barely able to walk or talk – a bumbling mess – but I still want to fight. An inmate I am provoking sees my state and he tries to avoid fighting, but I keep on until he knocks me down with a big hit to the jaw, and straddles me.
He tries to get me to see reason, but I refuse all attempts and then, as prison staff intervene, he just gets off.
I am now removed from the main body of the prison due to the assault, but when they are distracted I return to the wing to confront the inmate.
I have a Stanley knife concealed down my pants and go for him with it. He takes off and when prison staff try to subdue me I lunge at them and then go to my cell, grabbing a four-by-two bit of wood I have with nails sticking out of one end.
Wielding the nailed club, I call out the inmate’s name. Prison staff lock him in the compound yard and then try to approach and disarm me. But I turn on them and they call a jail security squad from Melbourne.
It will take an hour for them to arrive. And they just let me run loose – the jail is mine. But my friends convince me to surrender the weapons just before the squad arrives.
I am transferred from the jail. Not at my request either, I might add (and I would later face Geelong Magistrates Court over the incident with staff).
I arrive at D Division of Pentridge and when the effects of the pills wear off a day later I notice eating is a problem. My jaw is broken, again, so I’m sent to the locked St Augustine’s ward of St Vincent’s Hospital to get it wired.
19. RELEASE
9 APRIL 1988: RAGE AND REVENGE
Chris is nineteen years old.
CHRIS:
I am released full of hate and rage, sourcing weapons and soon involved in acts of violence not seen before. I am involved in a number of serious crimes, targeting elements of the state: financial institutions. Robbing them – not burglaries or thefts now.
When I entered Pentridge as a 17-year-old kid I looked up to the armed robbers of the day. I wanted to be one of them. And I get out and emulate exactly what I heard from them; I put it into practice.
I am very disturbed, very angry. I have been subjected to a lot of violence. And this is the thing: I have resentment towards the Office of Corrections and resentment towards police officers and the authorities because of what I have been subjected to. I have been tortured. I have been locked in isolation – and the anger when being released from isolation is extreme.
When I get out all I want is for them to pay. That is like compensation. Seriously. My main targets are state banks and government institutions. I didn’t want to get out and rob people, battlers or whatever. If I rob houses and stuff like that it will come out of people’s pockets and they will suffer a lot more. They aren’t the target of my crimes.
So I progress to armed hold-ups. And a number of shootings: true. The armed robberies are done solo. No back-ups for help. I am confident alone. I also purchase a stolen police bulletproof vest to wear during robberies.
I am so angry that I smoke pot to calm myself. But it doesn’t hold it in.
*
While having lunch with my girlfriend at an Asian diner in Footscray, I spot a prison officer from Pentridge. The Red Setter he is known as, a real nasty spiteful individual that works in D Division and had us all terrified: a bad basher he is.
At the diner he is with his wife, but that’s no barrier to me at all. The only thoughts running through my head are of the therapy he exacted on so many inmates and how ‘It’s your turn, fucker. Your dose now.’
At the first sight of him, I unleash a torrent of insults, much to the horror of all those eating in the area, my girlfriend included.
Not content with just a verbal assault, I pursue him and keep unloading an avalanche of profanity, much to the horror of his wife.
I follow him to K-Mart and when I am a few aisles away but drawing near, I select a carpet cutting knife from the shelf, and advance upon him with it clearly visible, while telling him I am going to cut him to shreds.
He takes off with me chasing. But I have no plans at all; I am just head-fucking him as he does to inmates.
As he is leading me towards the checkouts up front, I ditch the weapon, knocking a bunch of other items off a shelf with it, but he doesn’t notice, and I make out I still have it, lunging at him at times.
When we arrive at the checkout and are surrounded by security, all of a sudden he pulls out his prison badge – like a Starsky & Hutch move – and he tries to make a citizen’s arrest with the support of all the security.
He says that I have a concealed knife and tells security to arrest me. So I calmly unbutton my cardigan and open it up for everyone to see that I have no weapon. I just walk past everybody, telling them that I have no idea who he is.
They are lost for words.
The Red Setter decides to retrace our steps and locates the knife. The police are called in and he identifies me and hands the weapon to them.
I am questioned at Footscray police station.
Within days his house is petrol bombed and shot up. Or I guess it was supposed to have been, except whoever did it gets the address wrong, hitting his neighbours instead: it was number 15, not 13.
Needless to say, within a short time the police arrive at my house.
I get charged over the K-Mart matter, landing six months jail for it.
The Red Setter’s wife, I’m told, has a nervous breakdown over this, landing in a mental facility for four weeks and popping Valium like crazy. She still has not recovered.
This rage is a constant theme repeated
with nasty staff I encounter on the outside. I chase and spit at them on the outside – regrettable at times, I say, if truth be told. I have chased them through red traffic lights, driving them close to getting hit by oncoming vehicles.
Inside I have thrown faeces at them, hot water, eggs; I’ve pelted rocks at them in their towers for fun: true.
Yet outside if they’re decent types I actually shake their hands, offer to buy them a drink and sit down for a coffee to show there are no hard feelings; if they showed no malice to me then there is none given in return.
I have also reached out to decent likeable rogue prison officers. Do unto others as they do unto you, is the motto I practise. No favouritism: I don’t see the uniform, just the character of the soul.
The Red Setter has since mellowed out, realising – I feel – that nothing good ever came out of his conduct and that his marriage suffered as a consequence of his attitude to us.
We have shared jokes about how we were fuckwits then, and the things that can happen.
PROLIFIC
Chris confessing his unsolved heists to detectives at Barwon Prison in 2015.
Cop: To say that you were prolific would be an understatement?
Chris: Yeah. Within months of my release I’d be jumping counters. How long’s it take me to do an armed robbery? I spot the target, I look at the target, I know the time patterns. Within a week or two. Not fuckin’ six months.
20. LISTEN TO ME, FELLAS
May 1988: TAB Tottenham, Melbourne
Take: between $600 and $700
Chris is nineteen when he does his first armed robbery.
Mayhem Page 6