Killing Time

by Andrew Fraser

  I looked at Gorman and realised suddenly that had provided me with my first very important lesson in jail. What he had said was obviously incorrect, so for me to survive all I needed to do was the exact opposite of what he stated. Namely, the authorities may well have my body, but they would never have my mind, and from that moment forward I changed my attitude to serving the remainder of my sentence.

  Every waking minute I spent pursuing matters that were on the outside. With the exception of crime reports (for obvious reasons), I read the newspapers from cover to cover each day, even the obituaries! I kept in contact with friends on the outside. I wrote letters and I received a lot of letters from a wide range of people. You can have no idea what a joy it is, as an inmate, to receive a letter from an old friend out of the blue, telling you about their kids, what’s going on in their life, and including you in it and hoping that you are fit and well. Many people wrote once or twice, and that was more than sufficient, believe me – just to know that you hadn’t been forgotten was enough. To all those who did head for the hills, I always remember the line from George Orwell’s famous novel Animal Farm: “And the pig got up and slowly walked away”!

  One inmate who stood out because he was so inconspicuous was Christopher Hall. I know that might sound odd but the mere fact of his introversion made him noticeable. Christopher Hall is a serial rapist and was serving a huge sentence. Hall did nothing with his time except watch television, was not involved in any activities and was merely marking time until his release. My belief is that people like this should not be released unless they have undergone compulsory sex offenders’ programs – and even these can be useless in some cases. I really wonder whether chemical or physical castration for these violent recidivist sex offenders is not an answer.

  In any event Hall was a mate of Camilleri’s, and together they formed the core of the crew opposing Dupas et al. For some reason Camilleri had a real set against Dupas and it was mutual. There was a constant power struggle between them. They would not talk, they would not eat near each other. They would not even stand in the medication line together. This created huge pressure in the unit, and on more than one occasion there were fights. As I’ve said, Camilleri is a big man but can’t fight. Dupas is a small man, fat, but with immense power in his hands. He is a very dangerous person. He would not fight toe to toe; he would wait his chance and jump you. That is the sort of person he is.

  Dean Rayment, also one of the Dupas crew, had murdered Cindy Ward many, many years ago and when I met him he had served fifteen years. He is now released back into the community. One wonders why. “Dino” was illiterate to the degree that he could not fill out his canteen form each week without the help of Peter Dupas. Dupas even used to roll his smokes for him and all the time Dino had spent in jail, he had not been required to do any education. He was not a sex offender so didn’t have to do that program, and surprisingly began his supervised day leaves before his release from maximum security at Port Phillip. The leave program is designed to help prisoners who have served more than three years minimum to re-integrate into society. I was in jail with Dino when he was taken on his first leave after thirteen-odd years in custody. He is a chronic epileptic and is on heavy, heavy medication. He would do nothing the entire day except sit either outside smoking or in his cell watching television. He was medicated to the eyeballs and went home, I understand, to live with his aged grandmother.

  Dino’s leave was, believe it or not, into the central business district of the city of Melbourne, where he went to McDonald’s for the first time and then to the pictures. Can anybody explain to me how sitting in a darkened picture theatre for a couple of hours helps you re-integrate into society? This whole exercise backfired as poor Dino, being “out” for the first time in thirteen years, could not cope with the crowds or the pace of the place and freaked out in McDonald’s, dropped his burger and bolted upstairs to a quieter area. How do I know this? The screw who took Dino on the leave told me the same day.

  To say Dino was a mess would be an understatement. As I’ve already said he is a chronic epileptic, and one day they took him off his epilepsy medication. The almost immediate result was that Dino, at the top of the stairs on the first tier of the unit, had a fit and fell down these steel stairs to the bottom. Nobody knew what to do, including the screws. I rolled him onto his side, and we just had to let the fit run its course. He got up and was taken to the doctor – and was placed back on his medication.

  Another one of the Dupas crew was Mark England, known as Biff. Biff was doing twenty-three years for the murder and necrophilia of a grandmother in Geelong. He burgled her house searching for money to buy drugs, murdered the grandmother, then after she was dead had sex with her. He found some money and spent it on drugs, went back and repeated the process again, except on this occasion he tried to burn the house down for good measure. This poor woman had been left dead in her house for a couple of days.

  To show you how smart Biff was, he appealed against his conviction and his sentence and opened his appeal by berating the court, whereupon the judge promptly gave him an extra two years for contempt. If there is ever a move that is not very smart it is to abuse the court when you are seeking that very same court’s leniency.

  Biff too was virtually illiterate, and was only in his early twenties when convicted. He had a very long sentence to go, and on rare occasions would come and work with Dupas and me in the garden. He would swing the mattock for a few minutes, break into a sweat and then head back inside, and continue to do nothing, as was his wont.

  Biff is a classic example of what is wrong with jail. As a young man with a long sentence, rather than give him nothing to do, he should be subject to compulsory education, compulsory life skills and compulsory counselling. In addition he was morbidly obese. There is no compulsory physical fitness regime for such prisoners, and no proper diet, so he was allowed to just blow out. I was with Biff for fifteen months and not once did I see him with an educator or a counsellor. This leaves society in exactly the same position upon his release as it was when he went in. That is, exposed to somebody who is a murderer and a necrophile who is more than likely, due to their inability to cope, to murder again. If he’s educated and properly counselled and effectively re-programmed, it may well be different, but until these things are attended to, these sorts of things will continue to happen and society is the ultimate loser.

  One of the blokes I had real difficulty coming to terms with seeing in jail was Christopher Empey. He had previously been the state manager for Elders in Tasmania. He was married and had a young child who was born while he was in custody. Out of the blue, in a drunken rage while at a conference at Crown Casino, he violently attacked a female colleague, raped her and bashed her to such a degree that she was lucky to survive. Other injuries were inflicted on her which are frankly too terrible to recount here.

  When I met Empey I couldn’t work out why somebody who seemed so normal would behave in such a way. It appears, however, that over the years he had had trouble with binge drinking, would suffer blackouts and all these blackout episodes culminated in these offences taking place. He will have a very long time to come to terms with what he did. His life is ruined. He was gradually taken into the Dupas crew as well.

  The two odd bods in the unit were Carlos Cabal and his brother-in-law Marco Pasini. These two blokes were Mexican bankers who had fled Mexico after allegedly having ripped off billions of dollars from the Mexican Government. What followed was a legal circus of monumental proportions. Both Cabal and Pasini moved to Melbourne, where they bought houses and were living a normal life (if you call living the life of Riley normal) until the shit hit the fan and they were arrested on extradition warrants from Mexico. The pair of them were placed in Sirius East for their own protection because of the money they supposedly had.

  Well, what a great place to put somebody who needs protection; you are placing them in custody with blokes who have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by havin
g a billionaire in the next cell. Raymond Edmunds quite happily told me that he had extracted $200,000 from Cabal to “look after him” while he was in custody. Another prisoner received $10,000 to swap cells, and on it goes. Both of these admissions were made directly to me by the prisoners concerned, who proudly boasted how much they had been able to extract from the two “suckers”, as they described them.

  Cabal, who fought his extradition, had a team of lawyers that you couldn’t jump over, and ultimately returned to Mexico after a couple of years to be acquitted of all charges. He ended up doing a couple of years for nothing. When I arrived at Port Phillip, Pasini was still there. He was a very quiet bloke and kept to himself. Nobody went near him because money is power. He was able to look after himself by way of the protection he was able to purchase.

  It was always interesting to me that I could not even get bananas in jail, although I offered to pay for them. What transpired was a farce. The authorities repeatedly refused to provide me with bananas, until I threatened to take them to court on the basis that I was being discriminated against. The Jewish, the Muslim and the vegetarian prisoners were all given bananas but I as a WASP was refused them. So therefore I was being discriminated against. Mention the magic word discrimination and all of a sudden everything becomes possible. Within a couple of hours I had my bananas, and I continued to receive them weekly after that. I hasten to add that I was being charged approximately five times the going rate for those bananas each week. What is the point of complaining? You just kick along with it.

  In view of the great banana debacle I was always interested to see the fine array of Mexican food available inside supposedly the most secure unit, inside the most secure jail. How did it get there? Only one possible explanation: prison officers.

  Interestingly one of the prison officers got to go to Mexico at that time. Lucky I guess. The two Mexicans kept very much to themselves, and were not aligned with any of the factions within the unit. They didn’t need to be; they had money.

  There were other blokes in the unit. like Mick Hall, who was an armed robber and a hard man. He was there because he couldn’t help himself: every time he was arrested he would, for some reason, become a compulsive talker, and drop everybody else in the poo along with him. This made him very unpopular, to say the least, with other prisoners, and accordingly he could not go into mainstream, for fear of the physical ill that would be befall him from other prisoners he had informed on. This made for difficult times in the unit, because he considered himself to be above all of these other scumbags, who were mainly in for sex offences. Mick was what in jail jargon is known as a “Ten slap job”: one slap to start him talking, then nine to stop him!

  Another bloke called Mick (not Mick Hall) was in for a murder committed over a drug deal gone wrong when the delivery driver had been chained to a tree and shot more than once. There were a number of accused and Mick had dropped all of them in the shit along with himself. As the trial approached you could see the pressure mount. Where was the hard bastard who strutted about the unit telling everyone he was a bikie? One night just before the trial there was one hell of a to-do in the unit very late. All I could hear was someone saying “stay with me Mick” over and over. It turns out the brave man had slashed his arms from elbow to wrist and had nearly bled out when he called for help. As it turns out it was lucky he did set off the emergency alarm and it worked (surprisingly), because all were acquitted at the conclusion of the trial! You can always tell when someone is fair dinkum about suicide because they don’t cut across their wrists, they cut down. It is harder to stop the bleeding and to repair the veins.

  There was also another category of crook in Sirius East at the time: those who didn’t need protection from the rest of the prison; rather, the rest of the prison system needed protection from them. They were blokes who had such short fuses that they were likely to go off and belt anybody at any time. I had the privilege of sharing the space with a couple of such blokes. One was a particularly violent bloke called Austin Kildea. Austin was, to be polite, not playing with a full deck and used to let his fists do the talking rather than try to intellectualise his way out of anything. As a result, poor old Aussie was kept in protection for many years, and if the medication was late or didn’t arrive, as was so often the case, he would go off, more often than not belting into a screw.

  One day, when I was in another part of the jail, I saw Aussie being dragged off to the slot (solitary confinement) after belting yet another screw. Six officers were carrying him horizontal to the footpath, face-down. His hands were cuffed behind him and his legs were cuffed together. As the officers walked along, the ones in front dropped his face onto the ground and the others behind just kept pushing. You can imagine what that did to Austin’s face. Not good. Of course, prisoners who had a tendency to belt the screws were given a very wide berth, and the screws only went near them when absolutely necessary, for obvious reasons.

  There were a couple of other prisoners in this category, one of whom I used to play footy with. When, to quote him, he “chinned” one of the supervisors one evening, I was singled out for special treatment on the basis that I knew him. That’s the sort of logic that applies in jail.

  There were other blokes in the unit of a similar ilk, whose names I can’t remember. To give you an idea of the terrific blokes we had in there, there was a very old man who was in for raping his adult son. There was another bloke who was in for raping his daughter and he was so competent that he had shot himself in the head nine times with a nail gun, yes nine times, and hadn’t killed himself! How on earth can you do that to yourself and not take your own life? You can imagine what sort of a state this bloke was in. He was not travelling at all well and wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody else. He was a cave dweller – in other words, he came out of his cell for food or medication; the rest of the time he sat in his darkened cell with the curtains drawn.

  There was just one other category of inmate: those prisoners who were suffering obvious mental conditions and should patently not be in jail. A classic example was a bloke called Joe Smith. I’m telling you about Joe out of pity for Joe and my complete disgust with the system. I liked Joe and felt sorry for him. He had an unfortunate family background and was a chronic schizophrenic. All he did was take his medication and train on the weights. Joe was a huge man with massive strength. That strength was so breathtaking that, when Joe had a bad day mentally, everybody headed for the hills. Why was he in jail, you may ask. Well, ask any Australian State government why people like Joe are in jail rather than in mental institutions and you won’t get an answer. It was Mr Kennett who gutted the mental health system in Victoria and put the Joe Smiths of this world out on the street where it’s an iron clad certainty that they’ll commit offences and end up in the nick. Precisely the place they shouldn’t be.

  On one of Joe’s bad days, he started complaining that everybody was staring at him and talking about him on muster. That was always a sign that he was about to go “off”. Muster was concluded, nothing done … no one talks to Joe to try and calm him down; all the screws are terrified of him, so they leave him alone. The next thing the telly comes flying out of Joe’s cell door, which was on the first tier, and smashes on the floor in the middle of the unit. Joe follows, catapulting out of his cell, and starts barking at everybody, completely unintelligibly. Next Joey jumps from the top tier down onto the billiard table, then onto the floor like some sort of demented ape, screaming and shouting, his eyes out on stalks. He then races up to his cell. The screws follow him and lock the door. What happens next?

  Easy, the screws come and get the prison listener. A prison listener is another prisoner who has some training in counselling and who then talks to prisoners about any particular problems that they might not want to talk to doctors, psychologists or prison officers about. I was a prison listener in that unit and the screws came to my cell and asked me whether I would go and talk to Joey. Needless to say I was apprehensive.

 
I went up to Joe’s cell. The screws opened the cell door, and there was Joe sitting in the corner like a caged animal. I must say that, looking back now, I don’t think I would do this again. As I have said, Joe was immensely strong, and he could have snapped me in half if he felt like it. Instead he was sitting there like a kid. I walked in, and said to him, “Joey, it’s Andrew, I’m your friend, you know. Let’s have a chat about whatever the problem is.” Joe looked at me and my heart was in my mouth. Luckily everything went the right way and Joe calmed down sufficiently for the nurses to get some medication into him, which effectively knocked him rotten. He was then taken to the hospital.

  Joey was eventually released, and I’ve since found out that he was uncomfortable back in society. He committed more offences, and is now back in jail where he is more comfortable. This is a crying shame. This bloke needs help. He needs to be looked after. He doesn’t need to be locked in a maximum security prison every time he offends. He never gets leaves, which are designed to help people re-integrate. Why? Because everyone’s too terrified to take him on leaves; so he gets no counselling, nothing to help him re-integrate into society. He merely concludes his sentence, then the door is opened and out he walks, back into the world that he is not ready for. What happens? He can’t cope. He reoffends. Put back into jail, released again and so the merry-go-round continues forever for poor Joe Smith. Joey, if you read this book, I’m saying these things about you in a compassionate manner because I really like you. Joe Smith looked out for me while I was in jail, but he should be in an institution where he can be looked after properly.

  Joe Smith wasn’t the only prisoner who fell into that category. That’s why this has become a pet issue of mine: I saw far too many mentally ill people in jail. It is a disgrace. Nobody says anything about it. And when I start up, everybody hopes I will go away. I won’t. I will continue agitating until somebody does something for these people.