Hits and Memories: Chopper 2 (17 page)

During the 1970s, a great many boxing title holders ended up involved in crime and in prison. ‘Kid Billy’, a former Australian lightweight champ who was a well-known crim’s brother, did time in Pentridge in that era. And he had plenty of mates in there who had gone a round or two for a pound or two.

Lance Chee

LANCE Chee was one of the gang who robbed a Clifton Hill bank in 1976 where off-duty police officer Michael Pratt was shot. Chee was not involved in the shooting as he fled out the back door. He was sentenced to 15 years for his involvement in the robbery. In 1983, he escaped while visiting his sick grandmother in North Fitzroy. He was later recaptured and released in the later 1980s. Michael Pratt was awarded the George Cross for bravery in his attempts to stop the robbery.

LANCE Chee is a bloke who has been around for a long time. He is an old time crook, but with few, if any, of the old time criminal codes or morals running through him.

He used to run around with Keithy Faure. However, during the overcoat war he left Faure to fight alone.

Chee is another legend in his own lunchtime. A heavyweight amongst the limp-wristed junkie, gangster set. If you wear a dress, you could be in danger of a belt in the mouth, but as for the rest of the criminal world, Lance Chee is no threat whatsoever.

I am left totally puzzled as to how men like Lance Chee achieve their reputations. I mean, who has he ever beaten? Who has he ever shot? It is another mystery to me. Yet, believe it or not, he is a feared and respected criminal identity in Melbourne.

Pass the bucket. I feel sick.

Bustling Barry

ANOTHER Melbourne criminal I remember well is Bustling Barry. I got to know him in Geelong jail in 1984.

Bazza and I walked into the shower room to find a young man performing a sordid act on a well known crim. I said, ‘cut that shit out, you pair of poofters’, but they carried on as if it was a perfectly normal activity.

Barry kicked the young bloke under the jaw – not a full hard kick, but a solid boot all the same. Then both parties started to scream, with blood everywhere. One had a fractured jaw, and the other, a badly bitten dicky bird. Neither man told the authorities what had happened. I will not tolerate that sort of behavior in my presence.

Barry must have a thing about dicky birds. A karate expert attacked him once, and in the middle of a flying kick, Barry pulled the trigger on his 12-gauge shotgun, blowing his attacker’s personal parts to bits. Self defence, but, if I may say so, a touch heavy handed.

Shane Goodfellow

ON June 12, 1987, Mark Brandon Read shot dead a drug dealer, Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam, in the car park of the St Kilda nightclub, Bojangles. He was wearing a bullet proof vest provided by detectives at the time. Several witnesses were called at Read’s murder trial. Among them was an old enemy, Shane Goodfellow, who was at Bojangles that night. The jury elected to believe Read’s story that the killing was a clear-cut case of self defence. Goodfellow died of a drug overdose in 1992.

SHANE Goodfellow is dead. He went against me as a Crown witness in my murder trial over the Turk outside Bojangles.

Goodfellow, as I have said before, was a top crim, a violent streetfighter with a massive reputation as an up and comer, and there were no real signs that he would be stopped.

He was known as ‘Hollywood’ throughout the 1970s. There was no more feared streetfighter than him. His reputation for violence was horrific. There were few better than him in his day. There were some who were more violent, but few had his reputation. He and one of his mates were a streetfighting double act that demanded fear and respect and got it.

In 1979, Goodfellow and myself crossed swords in the H Division shower yards and it saw him up-ended and covered in his own blood for the first time.

In the incident in the shower yard, I punched ten shades of shit out of him – but he was still a man. You see, I cheated. I attacked the poor bugger while he was putting his pants on after he got out of the shower. But if people want fair play, they should join a cricket club.

Goodfellow took his bloody defeat well. Not a word of abuse or a threat followed. He took it on the chin with grace and style. He said it was his own fault: ‘I shouldn’t have turned my back on the sneaky bugger.’ He feared no man. He was also solid and would not talk in a police station. He made no complaint over our fight in the shower yard. He wouldn’t dream of it. He lived by the sword, and if he fell on it now and again; that’s the way it went.

Shane could have been anything within the criminal world, but he fell to drugs. Heroin in the arm did what no man could to ‘Hollywood’. It took his dignity.

From being a feared street fighter he turned into a lackey for two-bob gangster drug dealers.

Scum that Shane would once have spat on gave him orders. They held him in check and controlled him. He was under the control of heroin and it was sad to see. From legend to lackey; it made me sick to watch it. So when he gave evidence against me in the murder trial it was because drugs had destroyed his sense of criminal honor. But I must add that if anyone who ever went to trial had a Crown witness against them like Shane Goodfellow, no one would ever be convicted. Ha ha.

He was a tough man, hut then the drugs got hold of him and he started the slow, pathetic decline that so many like him have suffered. I have mixed feelings about his death as I remember him as the man he was, before drugs.

However, an enemy is an enemy, and a dead enemy is wonderful news. As I have said many times before, the one who wins the game is the one who lives the longest.

All I want to do is outlive my enemies. All I want out of life is to have the last laugh. So to Shane, what can I say but . . . ha, ha.

Jimmy Reimers

JIMMY Reimers and I grew up together in Prahran, and went to the Turana boys home together. We have known each other for a long time. We were always friendly, but we went our separate ways. He became a good friends with my worthy adversary Keithy Faure and the man who turned informer on me, Shane Goodfellow.

I am sad to say that Jimmy got into the heroin and the needle. He backed Keithy against me in the great overcoat war in Pentridge. We were in B and H Divisions together and also spent some time in Jika Jika.

When I gave it to Goodfellow in the H Division shower yard, Jimmy had to get a smack as well. But for some reason, we always remembered our past. Prahran and the boys’ home: we had been through too much together to become blood enemies.

Jimmy ended up waking up about a lot of his so-called friends. But it was too late.

He is a knockabout crook who isn’t frightened of violence, and no one could doubt his guts. He got shot in the neck at St Vincent’s Hospital trying to escape. He was a young gunman who was on his way up until the smack got him.

We liked each other a lot as kids, and youthful memories are hard to shake. But he went his way and I went mine. It is too late to say it now, but if Jimmy had stuck with me, he would have been much better off.

Lionel the Lip

THERE are more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with cream . . . and more ways to make money from crime than by pointing guns at people or lighting up the old blowtorch under their toes. Something the public doesn’t hear much about are the con men who have made a career of touching people for big amounts of money. Everyone knows the film
The Sting
, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but not many realise there are smarties right here in Australia every bit as cagey as the Henry Gondorff character played by Newman in the film.

It was never really my line of work, but I always take an interest in other people’s trades, and one of the best in the con business in Australia was a gentlemanly old chap called Lionel the Lip.

Lionel, bless his heart, was an old man even when I first met him. I was 17 years old and he was well into his 60s, so I reckon he would be dead now . . . unless he talked God into extending his time on this side of the pearly gates, which is a chance, as Lionel was nothing if not a good talker. In fact, as a trickster and confidence man, Lionel was considered one of the best to draw breath or a dud cheque. A kind-looking, well-mannered old gent, he specialised in giving the impression that he was a wealthy farmer, grazier, land owner, horse breeder, cattleman, gold mine owner or gem dealer. He looked like someone’s nice old uncle down from the bush – but he was old bird and had as much larceny in him as Long Bay. Or maybe more.

Lionel mostly worked the country circuit, regional cities and mining areas. He was a great student of human nature, and that was the secret of his success. He told me that the only person easier to trick than an honest man is a dishonest one. He taught me that the golden rule of every con is greed and getting the other bloke to believe that he is taking advantage of you.

Like I say, it wasn’t exactly my line – but he taught me some things about human nature I won’t forget. He was an old gent, a non-violent man, who worked using physical appearance and verbal banter as weapons. A master of his craft, he had a better practical grasp of applied psychology than a university full of shrinks.

Donny the Don

DONNY is Australia’s oldest and foremost safe cracker. The man is a craftsman and has been the pupil master of Australia’s leading younger ‘tank’ men.

From a key lock to a time lock, Donny the Don has cracked them all. He was caught a few times in his younger days, as a result of being informed on, or just through sheer bad luck. But he has never faced a tank he couldn’t open.

Donny was an old time crook – non-violent, quiet, a gentleman criminal from the old school.

I understand that when Jimmy the Toecutter was approached re torturing Donny the Don for his money, he was appalled at the suggestion. Jimmy said that Donny was an old gent and a master and that he would not consider lifting a hand against him.

Bob Dix

BOB Dix was the secretary of the Victorian Branch of the Federated Ships Painters and Dockers Union. He was thrust into the limelight as a defender of his members during the Costigan Royal Commission into organised crime. Dix died of natural causes in 1988.

I GREW up in the days when the Painters and Dockers were a feared force. But I was to learn over the years that most of that reputation was built on drunken yarns with old men in pubs around Port Melbourne, Prahran and inner suburban areas.

One of the leaders of the dockies in those days was Bobby Dix. I grew up with his nephews Lee and Wade Dix in Prahran in Melbourne, and I knew Bobby and his brother Billy.

Bobby drank in various pubs in Prahran. In 1972 me, Terry ‘The Tank’, ‘Cowboy Johnny’ Harris and Dave the Jew were punching on with another group of young chaps in the Prahran commission flats when Bobby Dix staggered up and tried to break up the fight. We told him to piss off, and in a loud voice he announced he was going to call the police. And sure enough, he rushed off to the phone box. Me and the rest of my crew followed, not believing he meant to do it. But he was serious. We dragged him out of the phone box and told him we’d kick his arse if he tried to do it.

He might have had a big reputation on the water front, but I always remembered Bobby’s attempt to call the cops on a bunch of kids. I spit on the old dog’s grave.

On the day Pat Shannon got blown away, Machine Gun Bobby was supposed to be acting as his bodyguard. When Billy Longley sat in the dock on trial for the murder of Pat Shannon, ‘Putty Nose’ Nicholls lunged at the dock and spat at Billy, screaming ‘I hope you get life, Longley’.

So much for the rock solid, moral character of the Victorian Federated Ship Painters and Dockers.

Peter Vaitos

PETER Vaitos, known as the ‘Silver Gun Rapist’ was a man who terrorised the women of Melbourne in the 1970s. A burglar who raped women at gunpoint.

In November 1980 he was sentenced to 28 years with a minimum of 25 after he was convicted on 10 counts of rape, one of buggery, three of aggravated burglary, one of assault occasioning bodily harm, one of attempted rape and one of burglary.

IT’S no secret I’ve never had much time for sex offenders of any sort, and child molesters have never enjoyed the best of health if they have the misfortune to be put near me in jail. But one sex offender I did know and didn’t mind as a bloke was Peter Vaitos, the ‘Silver Gun Rapist’.

Vaitos used to cut my hair in Pentridge for a while. We used to get talking, and one day he told me a story about one of his rapes. It concerned a very posh woman in her 30s who was rather beautiful. The way he told it she returned from playing tennis one day to find him robbing her house. She was outraged, and flew into a fit of verbal abuse, as it seems she had been the victim of three previous burglaries.

Vaitos then raped her. He said she surrendered to the attack and didn’t struggle – which is hardly surprising, as he had her at gunpoint. Then, as he was leaving with the various valuables he had picked out she said: ‘Can you leave the television – it’s a Blaupunkt’. So Peter left it, and it turned out later that he was never charged with that offence, because the woman never reported it.

Of course, that’s the way he told the story. In spite of his various yarns regarding his rapes and burglaries one was left in some doubt as to their truth, because he made rape sound funny. And I know there is nothing funny about rape. But then again, I make violence sound funny, and apart from the black comedy, in reality there was little to laugh about from the other fellow’s point of view. It’s hard to smile with no teeth.

However, in relation to Peter Vaitos, he did seem to have a way with the female prison staff. I couldn’t see the attraction myself, as Peter is a rather ugly bastard at the best of times. But he did have a winning way with females.

I often saw female prison officers making a fuss of Vaitos. One seemed very friendly, indeed. She later left the prison service.

Another thing about Vaitos was that he also had the strongest, most powerful hands of any man I’d ever met. If he grabbed hold of your wrists – and he was quite skilful at catching a wrist in each hand – you were powerless to break free of his grip. He did this once to me in jest, and I said ‘You’ve got rapist’s hands, Peter. How could any female break free if I can’t?’ He was a strange fellow. And for some odd reason I cannot explain I didn’t mind the bloke. But don’t hold that against me.