CHRIS:
I’m arrested for stealing a car that belongs to a police officer from Moonee Ponds. He wants the motor and the identification tags returned, but I don’t oblige so all he has is the shell.
They bash me as a result and charge me with drug offences and assaulting police. I’m kept in Brunswick police station’s lockup.
I get hold of hacksaw blades, and start feverishly cutting the bars separating the exercise yard from the rear of the watchhouse area. I spend hours on this with only the thickness of a match to go when a bit of bad luck hits. With the changing of the watch, the watchhouse keeper unexpectedly walks past, by pure luck catching a glimpse of what’s occurring, yells out to the rest, and they arrive ten deep to find the fresh tailings and the bar cut.
I am moved to another watchhouse as a result, knowing that very soon I’ll be landing in D Division’s remand wing, where the Red Setter awaits, quite possibly a little dirty about that K-Mart incident from a month or so back.
29. WELCOME BACK TO PRISON
1988–89:
PENTRIDGE
CHRIS:
Well, as expected the Red Setter isn’t letting it go. His co-workers bash the shit out of me.
A lot of hate in me now. Lot of anger. I’m violent to other prisoners.
One bloke who’d cracked me a good one before is there in the yard so I fill a pillow slip with tins of baked beans, slam him in the fucking head, and then set to work with fists alone. But he’s an amateur boxer and a good one and comes back hard, the staff loving the raw value of our war and letting the blood-soaked cage match go the distance.
Twenty-four minutes it takes us to quit from exhaustion, one of my front teeth and plenty of blood gone and our hands hanging like lead. The staff finally enter the yard and we’re sent to the doctors for a patch-up and then placed together back out in the yard the next day.
They loathe both of us and no doubt they’re anticipating a rematch; no doubt they want one. I am concerned no end, as he has proven such a tough cookie. He gave one of the hardest prison fights I would ever have: the ferocity, the intensity – a brutal bloody clash.
But knowing that we are just spectator sport for the screws offends us both, and denying the screws the satisfaction is the only reason we make peace.
I have the utmost respect for the man. He was the best fight I have ever had in my entire life. Punch for punch, he was a machine.
24 APRIL 1989:
B DIVISION EGGS TO CHOP
What I call not being happy about getting bashed, but they call ‘conflict’ with the screws that bash me, eventually sees me transferred to B Division, a wing for long-term inmates with behavioural issues – not that I see Red Setter here.
So here in B, I hide in my cell, step into the corridor, lob four eggs in quick succession at the screws’ box, and then step back inside.
The target is a particular officer who rides inmates relentlessly and will later get stabbed by a prisoner.
You can hear the eggs hitting: splat, splat, splat, splat. They screws hate it, and a rotting egg smell will linger for days to come.
I have four timed perfectly for the throw and withdraw. That means it’s time to go for a PB – personal best – but no, five gets me pinched; I lose privileges and if anything else happens I’m going to Hell.
In the exercise yard, I throw rocks at the towers, smashing the windows in front of screws with bad attitudes.
Off to H.
Where resides that dog, that coward, that copper with a silent ‘H’.
Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.
29 MARCH 1989: H DIVISION
Hardcore H Division. I’m now a graffiti man expressing the bigness of this world, carving doors and walls with the love that makes H great.
I write: Hate all those who Hate you.
I write: Hate them even more.
They are all hardcore when I arrive. Chopper Read is here, Alex Tsakmakis – the one that Slime – Craig Minogue – kills. There is a group of them, a couple of murders happen, and sometimes they get pinched.
They are all hardcore inmates.
*
I am at war with Chopper Read.
I hate the cunt. I don’t like him. I have issues with him. He tampers with my food on a number of occasions and fucks around with my washing, ’cos he is the laundry billet, the trusty down here.
I don’t put my washing out anymore because I know he will put a cup of piss in the last rinse. That way when you wear it or use your bedding you’ll get that piss smell through it.
He fucks around with the food, too.
He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. He thinks by grinding up glass and putting it in the meals it will have the same effect as shards. It doesn’t. It’s like sand.
He puts it in my jelly. I spot it. I say, ‘You fucking imbecile.’
I declare him.
All this started when I verbally confronted him in D Division, where he’d arrived into remand for shooting the Turk at Bojangles.
On my way to parade, I actually open Chopper’s cell trap when he’s on the bottom landing on protection: 23-hour lockup.
I invite him out to play in the yard. He wants to know who I am so I identify myself and tell him straight that I am not happy with him shooting Chris Liapis at Footscray – a bloke I knew.
He does not take up my offer to enter the yard. But that’s what started it.
Then, lo and behold, within six months he’s down in H Division and I land soon after. But before I land he establishes himself; he’s got all the screws onside: he’s worked with them for many years.
He is the laundry wing billet, having easy access to weapons and the tacit support of the Ku Klux Klan screws, who includes ‘Maggot’, a sadistic prick who actually likes being called that.
He’s worked with the coppers, standing over drug dealers at their bidding. At this stage there is a corrupt pocket of coppers in the drug squad. They will stand over you. They will extort you. If you pay them, you won’t get pinched – you won’t get arrested. If you don’t pay, they know you are doing business and they want a piece of the action.
If you don’t give them a piece of the action you’ll get pinched. A lot of them pay, some of them don’t. For the ones that don’t, the coppers say, ‘Well, fuck youse,’ and they send in Chopper.
They can give him all the details – the address, the movements, everything – because they’re doing surveillance on these people. They’ll supply him a bulletproof vest and guns. He’ll run in there, he’ll take the drugs, he’ll take the cash, and then he’ll divide it with the coppers.
That’s the truth. That’s how he used to operate. Copper with a silent ‘H’.
The Turk that he shot at Bojangles [Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam, killed with a shotgun blast to the face in 1987 outside a St Kilda nightclub] was a drug dealer that he tried to stand over.
He pleaded self-defence, and guess who gives evidence for Chopper?
The coppers: the corrupt coppers he was working with.
*
The screws hate a crazy bastard, Richard Mladenich, who Chopper then ambushes, seriously injuring him with a spade to the head. After the attack, Chopper runs to the protection of the staff, the coward.
His yard mate, Craig ‘Slime’ Minogue, a Russell Street bomber, will kill another multiple murderer, Alex Tsakmakis, in the same spot.
Interesting days here in H Division: anything can happen. Two songs I like are Bon Jovi’s ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ and Seal’s ‘Crazy’. Chopper can’t stand them, so I play them again and again and again and again and again and again – round and round and round and round until he’s losing it. Makes me love those songs even more.
22 AUGUST 1989: RELEASED FROM CUSTODY
CHRIS:
Outside again. Good times. Smoking a lot of pot but doesn’t do shit. What are you looking at, fuckhead? We got issues?
PRISON SLANG: LESSON THREE
The Squad – special emergency respon
se team: feared, not to be messed with
Wing – what cell blocks are called
Safe – anal passage where drugs, syringes and weapons are kept to move around prison
31. ATTACK THE COMMONWEALTH AGAIN
29 August 1989: Commonwealth Bank, Noble Park, Melbourne Take: $23,757
CHRIS:
Noble Park is not my area and I don’t know it well but I just want to have a go at a different part of town. Why not, ya know?
A week or two before the job I catch the train to this far-flung spot in south-east Melbourne and have a look at it all – do my pre-operation planning: check out the roads, the angles, the other shops around, the cat and foot traffic, the ways in and out.
Not being my area, if I get into a chase with the coppers it’s gonna be hard, but the bank’s not far from the station so I decide to catch a train after the robbery.
On D-Day I ride to the suburb and steal a couple vehicles to use, positioning the secondary car at the rear of the car park - basically behind the bank.
The primary vehicle carries my work tools: a sawn-off automatic shotgun and a stack of plastic freezer bags. Over a set of regular clothes, I’m wearing an overcoat and trackie pants. I’ve got plastic gloves on, and the balaclava’s ready to pull down.
With only a couple of minutes left before go-time – high noon – a cop car’s parked out the front of the bank. But this is all about patience. Soon enough they fuck off – kindly leaving me their prime parking spot.
I leave the car idling while my engine races.
Here we fucking go.
I storm in, a faceless, black-clad guerrilla, shouting, ‘This is a hold-up! Hands in the fucken air! Now!’ Some dickhead customer at the counter’s just staring with an attitude I haven’t got time for so I line up his face with the shotgun. ‘You right just standing there, are ya, ya fucking cunt?’ I walk straight up to the prick and his hands go north. ‘Don’t you fucking move.’
Continuously sweeping the room with the business end of the gun, I move along the line of tellers, tossing over freezer bags to fill, telling them big notes first and shouting at them to hurry, hurry, hurry.
Some bastard’s snuck up a set of stairs at the back. Can’t have that shit. ‘You! You that’s gone upstairs. Get back here! I can see you hiding.’ I’m burning up the carpet going back and forth to get a view of him, but in robberies time is the fucking master so I get my focus back on making the tellers pack faster, faster, faster. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Empty your drawers. Move it!’ A white cloth bag sits near a teller: the big stuff. I’ve struck it rich - my timing’s perfect. ‘I’ll have that, too,’ I say.
While the sheilas scramble some bank bloke’s just sitting on his arse. Can you fucking believe it? ‘Get up, you fuckwit! Get up and help!’
Tick tock: on the job, I never have to look at a watch – me and time are close; I know how it moves; how it can seem to drag or seem to rush but that’s just our moods and, actually, each tick of a second is exactly the same distance apart and no matter how crazy shit is I can fill that gap with a thousand things – I can live a thousand times a second on jobs like this where I control the floor, commanding fear and seizing the cash of this rotten state.
The alarm sounds – it’s on, man. There’s still time – still enough seconds - but the blare puts panic into the punters who are already reeling from shock. And panic is dangerous. Gotta maintain control. Gotta stop everyone, anyone, anything from disrupting my program. I spin and eyeball that fucking prick who gave me attitude on entry, and then point the shotgun at a petrified teller who hasn’t produced jack shit. ‘Fill the fucking bag! Hurry up or I’ll blow your fucking head off!’
She crams more in.
‘That wasn’t hard, was it?’ I take her bags and do the rounds collecting the rest.
Passing the smug prick on the way out, I let the menace in me rise and swell: the gun barrel with it. ‘Gonna try anything, cunt?’
‘No, no, no – not me,’ he says.
I growl at him, call out to all ‘Have a nice day’, and walk into the light, throwing the bags in the vehicle.
At the back of the car park I switch cars, driving just around the corner to where there’s an upstairs flat with a parking spot beneath. Tucking the car in there, I pull off the overcoat and trackie pants, and jam the shotgun and all the money bags – including the white cloth one which isn’t a big-note jackpot after all but instead holds rolls of two-dollar coins – inside a fresh sports bag.
The station is less than 100 metres from the bank and I reach it before the police arrive. I don’t see much of the commotion, however, because I’ve timed it all so that a train pulls in very soon after I do.
They won’t be looking for the bandit on the train so I just dump the bag beside me and smile at pretty girls as we roll on towards Flinders Street Station.
*
This crime is unsolved until Chris contacts police in 2015 and volunteers his responsibility. He is subsequently being charged and in 2016 pleading guilty in Melbourne Magistrates Court.
32. AN ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING PIECE OF DRIVING
27 OCTOBER 1989: ARRESTED IN FOOTSCRAY
Chris turned 21 three weeks ago.
CHRIS:
I have such hatred for uniforms, for police, for authority, for the state, that when I’m driving in my own car I won’t even pull over for a routine stop in Williamstown at 1.30 in the afternoon.
I refuse, and what might have been a quick rego check or random breath test becomes an extended pursuit that builds and builds until eighteen cop cars and a helicopter are swarming me.
Lasting 24 minutes – the same length of time as my blood-soaked cage fight in Pentridge last year – it’s a crazy car chase.
But not a very fast one.
I’m driving a clapped out ex-taxi with over a million k’s on the clock and running on LPG. At one point I reach maybe 120 kilometres per hour but then the four-speed gearbox packs it in, the linkages for third and fourth separating and leaving me with only first and second.
A slow noisy chase is better than no chase at all, I figure, doing 80 in second. The engine absolutely screams, while all around cruise petrol V8 cop cars, with a chopper on top.
We wrangle through a swag of suburbs, but the coppers decide they’ve had enough as we enter a roundabout by Footscray Hospital and ram me into cyclone fencing.
My cab’s a total write off.
And once they make sure I’m all right, they bash the shit out of me. My injuries are said to be from the crash, but since when does a crash leave bruises in boot-print patterns?
*
When this goes to court the next year, I get twelve to eighteen months for what Magistrate Paul Grant calls ‘an absolutely shocking piece of driving’.
Well, it’s been hard for me to get sustained practice behind the wheel, although Dad started me early – letting me drive at seven.
The police prosecutor reckons I went above 130 kilometres per hour but I don’t believe that. Maybe the coppers did to get in front of me. He also tells the court that three police cars crashed during the pursuit and that I drove through red lights, cut across lanes, didn’t obey stop or give-way signs, failed to indicate my intention to turn corners or change lanes, drove on the footpath, and lost control of my own car several times. The coppers who ‘crashed’ were probably the ones that rammed me.
The Sun newspaper writes it all up, quoting my lawyer about how the longest time I’ve been out of custody in the last seven years has been four months.
33. TOASTED
OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 1989: METROPOLITAN REMAND CENTRE
CHRIS:
On Halloween they put me in the old Melbourne Remand Centre on Spencer Street but I reckon I can get out with a toaster.
There’s a perspex window in the unit outside my cell and getting through that will get me into position to abseil down to the street and get to a motorbike which has kindly been parked around the corner.
A Kawa
saki GPZ1100, I’m led to believe it is, and a worked GPZ. I also understand that it’s all ready for me with a full tank, sandwiches, a couple litres of drinking water, a radio, and a pistol. The goodies are in a gear sack. Unzip that and the keys should be sitting right on top. Some cunt better not steal it.
So I obtain a commercial toaster and fashion the heating elements to fuse together into a single file burner. When I press this against the window, the perspex melts like butter. It’s beautiful.
But when I pull the burner back, plumes of smoke billow up, setting off the supersensitive fire alarms they have here – even when I’ve got a vacuum cleaner sitting right on it sucking up the plumes. It captured a lot of it but some of the perspex melted onto the elements and that was hard to control.
But that’s to be expected. I know to expect the call from control to the officers’ station. I work until I hear the phone, then wrap the element in a wet towel and place it in a bin.
The officers call a fire check muster and I stand in front of the window, obstructing the screws’ view of the burn. Then back to work, which sets off the alarm again and once more I shield the thermal incision from sight.
I’m that close. The bike’s waiting, I have extension cords ready for the abseil, and with just a tiny bit more cutting I’ll be able to kick out the window and go.
But the alarm goes off for a third time, and there’s no hiding the black, burnt mess of a window.
The screws are having a fit, but nothing directly links it to me. The vacuum cleaner is out on the landing so I’m not in possession of it, nor am I in possession of the bin and the burner in it.
Where things don’t look so good is how I’m always standing directly in front of the window.
Mayhem Page 8