Summer Q and A: Part 2

This is Life and Crimes. I'm Andrew Rule, and we're looking at more reader questions from our mailbag.

Billy didn't come from a crime family. Billy did not have a tattoo. He was just a tough kid who grew up in the Depression out in the inner western or northern suburbs ascot Vale area and became a tough guy by osmosis really, and the rest of his family was pretty respectable. I remember meeting them at his eightieth birthday. But Billy was described at that birthday by a former governor of Penridge as a straight arrow in a yard full of rubbish or something like that. So he impressed people.

Billy had a deep, strong voice, a commanding presence, and absolute gravitas. He had a strong personality and in different circumstances would have made an impressive leader in a military sense, or in business or something like that. As a crook, he was highly disciplined. Other crooks were drunks and idiots and lunatics who did mad things. Billy would always think

things through. Billy got hold of a cult forty five pistol and taught himself to shoot really well, and so when people started to shoot at him, they would miss at fifteen meters or twenty meters, and he would them with his shots because he was good at it. He would keep his weapons well oiled and in good order, which a lot of crooks didn't. He would not drink to excess, which a lot of crooks did. This didn't

make Billy a good bloke or a kind bloke. I'm not suggesting that he was an upstanding citizen in every way. He wasn't. His first wife died in very questionable circumstances, although he was cleared of that homicide very well represented in court. I think Billy though interesting. Man and Philip Adams, the great radio and print man ad Man and soon rates Billy as one of the most interesting of the many thousands of people that he's interviewed in fifty years.

Number two on a short list of for Chopper Reid, who knew Billy quite well. Chopper Reid was mad and bad as a kid, probably mentally disturbed in a way, probably had some form of a form of autism or something like that. He certainly had been disturbed because his mother was pretty well a religious zealot, very straight laced woman who was a Seventh Day Adventist. She was the daughter of a clergyman and her family were extremely respectable people.

In fact, Chopper's mother's brother, that is, his uncle, was a doctor who became well known for doing a radio show. He was known on the radiators I think doctor James Wright, which wasn't his actual name, but was famous around Australia at one time as a radio doctor who gave advice on the radio. His Chopper's sister, Mark Brandon Reid is his real name. His sister, respectable woman. Her son I think,

became a West End producer in London of theater. But Chopper's father was a returned World War Two soldier, Keith Reid, who I think was a classic disturbed soldier with PTSD and had mental issues, and he brought out the worst in his son and probably pushed him along the road towards the sort of man he became. I have to say that Chopper Read hadn't had flat feet. He had very flat feet. If he had not had flat feet. He was a big, strong, strapping young fellow who could

shoot really well. Was intelligent in fact, not very literate, but intelligent, and would have made an extremely good soldier. But he couldn't get into the military because of his feet, and that send him down the wrong path. Interesting guy could knock out rhyming couplets the way that rappers can. In a way, he was like a rapper. He could write stuff that rhymed. He was funny. He was a

very good conversationalist and a good storyteller. And he collected a lot of story who is in jail because the yarnspinner's in jail, And he collected them and adapted them to his own purposes, and they were the basis of a lot of what he wrote. Very funny. Going third one not so funny, more intense, but intelligent. His name was Ray Mooney mn e Y, probably a moody fella. Came out of middle class Melbourne, I'd say, from the more or less Catholic establishment, from one of a better

phrase went to one of the better Catholic schools. Was a schoolboy athlete of note, as was Andrew Fraser. One of probably almost one of the rivals in his era was Andrew Fraser from a different school. Ray Mooney I think was a crackerjack, runner and all around athlete, probably a very good footballer and could fight and do all those things. Period physical piece of work went down the wrong track. He apparently committed was convicted of quite a

serious sexual assault. I don't know the circumstances of it. It was the sort of crime which could lead to people getting very severe sentences in those days for something that might or might not have been a severe crime. Now. I don't know what the circumstances were, but it's conceivable that Ray Mooney was not as guilty as perhaps a judge and jury thought he was. It might well have something to do, possibly with the identity of the alleged victim.

I don't know. But he's an intelligent man, an interesting man, and he wrote a lot of things, and he still writes stuff. But he wrote a novel called A Green Light, which was a thinly veiled story about crime in Victoria and Australia. The central character of which was clearly his good friend in jail, Christopher Dale Flannery, the hitman who ended up disappearing in Sydney, was undoubtedly shot dead by Bent police in Sydney after becoming too much of a

danger to a lot of people up there. And Ray Mooney, when he published the book way back in the late eighties, was at pains to say it was not about Christopher Dale Flannery, but years later he said to me, yeah, well of course it was. And it's a really effective novel. It predates things like reservoir dogs, but it covers that sort of territory. It's not the only thing he's done. He wrote by something called Every Night, which was the basis for a film. He's worked on a lot of

things and he's highly respected in certain circles. Very interesting man. And the fourth one is David McMillan. We call him mcviillaan. David McMillan, conman, drug trafficker, half a genius undercover copper that I know, said that McMillan was the smartest crime he ever met. McMillan, back in the days before computers took over, could memorize hundreds of plane timetables so that he could work out which plane slanted where and when and how you could get off one and on another.

And he did this because he worked out how he could get a heap of false identities, which he did by pretending to be someone who was dead. He would go and find graves of little children that had died back in the same year when he was born, back in late fifties, and he would assume those identities, and he would get passports and bank accounts and other things in those identities and build them up so that when he traveled overseas where he would pick up drugs, don't

worry about that. He was an absolute villain. He would pick up drugs, or he would send other people couriers

to pick up drugs. And when he got to somewhere where he was in our drug sort of venue, like Thailand or Burma or something like that, he would then fly out of there on a different passport and go to London, and he would swap identities around so that when he was coming back to Australia it would appear that he had not been in the drug related place, but had been in somewhere innocuous like Holland or Sweden or something like that, and that meant it was much

easier for him to bring back drugs hidden in luggage or in goods that he had sent back, and he and his friends, a friend of his called Sullivan. Sullivan had been a champion schoolboy pole vaulter. Now here's the thing. We've now got three people that I've mentioned here today that were champion schoolboy athletes. McMillan's friend was a dinky

die champion schoolboy Paul Volter. His old coach told me that if he hadn't broken his ankle or a leg or something as a teenager, he would have gone to the Olympics and been one of the best in the world because he was an elite athlete. But the injury meant he couldn't go on with it. And the injury was so painful that he sought drugs to alleviate the pain, and that led him down the path of using drugs, which led him to form an alliance with David McMillan,

which ultimately destroyed them both. They became addicts, they got caught, they went to jail, and their lives turned to absolute ruin. McMillan is still alive over in the UK somewhere, but he's been in and out of jail around the world for all these years. I did publish a book by him called mcvillain. He was a most engaging correspondent. He was a liar and a con man, and a cheat and a fraud, but he could write really well and is a very funny, astute fellow and a very acute

observer of the criminal millieu. He would be a good man to have at that table. However, the problem, Sharon with having four people like that at the table is that they would compete for airspace with each other, and they'd want to show off and try and stand over each other and stare each other down, and inevitably what would happen would be that probably Billy Longley and Ray Mooney would end up butting horns with the others. McMillan would sit back and take notes because he wasn't a

tough guy. He was a thinker and a funny guy and a conman. The conversation might end up a bit one sided at that dinner party and might be as enjoyable as perhaps you might think, because what those guys need is an audience and what they don't like is an audience that's competing with them. The food I would select for them would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

of his copy? How did that come together? Was he telling tales far from the truth? And what did you think about the book after we'd been published.

he never really left. And John has become that rare person that has been a police and crime reporter all his career. He's a specialist. He knows crooks, he knows coppers. He's the son of a former senior policeman, the late Fred Silvester, who was an assistant commissioner. And John is an astute observer of the scene, very good speaker, very

funny man himself. He tells the story of going out to Pendridge to interview Chopper Read and being ushered into a small room and instead of shaking hands, Chopper reaches out and grabs John's thumb and places that thumb on a small oppression in Chopper's head and said, he said, that's where the ice pick went in. And John said something like, well, mostly on the outside we shake hands, but if you want to show me the scar in your head where the ice pick went in, that's fine.

That's fine by mate. And so they talked away. John wrote a story, and the story writ in the paper, and it was a good story. It was an interesting story, and it pleased the editor and please John, please, I think might please chop a read. Even though it was fairly negative towards him, it didn't please the authorities who gave him another six months. I think was one of the problems. But Chopper put the hard word on. Johnny said, look, I realized that the most famous crooks are the ones

who were written about that in the Old West. The ones who got well known, Believe the Kid and all the rest of them were the ones that the knock about reporters wrote Penny dreadful about them, masters and all those Old West names. He wanted to be well known like those guys. He wanted to be the best known crooks and Squeze Tailor and Ned Kelly. And he realized the only way to do that was to tell stories and have them in the media, in newspapers as he saw it then, and he said, I want you to

write a book about me. I'll come out and we'll get some pizzes and beer and tape recorder and I'll record it and he'll turn it into a book. And John drew himself up to his full six foot and half an inch and said, no, you won't. If you want to write a book, you write yourself. And so Chopper gets some penridge, prison notepaper and a biro and he sits up against his television in his cell at night with the faint light of the TV, and he starts writing. Now to answer the question, his writing was

very primitive, big ugly letters, really bad spelling. It looked like the writing of someone who'd stopped learning to write in a grade four or five, which is possibly true. But the fact that Chopper couldn't spell unless he was spelling the names of guns or things like mesha schmids. He could always spell those, but he's spelling was really

idiosyncratic and crazy, very primitive forming of letters. But he was funny and he told stories that were funny, and many of them were his own stories, some he borrowed from others. He'd say, well, I was talking to Ray Chuck the other day, whe I was talking to someone and they told me this. And he would take the stories of other people and tell them and he was really good at it. And I have to say that when he started sending these letters in to John at

the newspaper, every day, there'd be another one. Every day there'd be another one, and John open them up and come over and say this mad bugger's he is writing stuff. Look, he's one about his child, it is one about his dad, he's one about when he stole his first bike. Whatever. And indeed he wrote enough material that John and I, who had just decided to write a book together, a different book. We were going to call it. I think we're going to call it Bent, and it was going

to be a fictionalized novel about Bent Coppis. I think we'd written one page of that together, because I'd published a book at this dage, and John realized that together we might be able to do something. We said, let's chuck in our thing and do Chopper because it's there, it's easy to do, and it's hitting the pigeon hole

every day. And so John would get these letters and he would just type them up roughly in the system at the Sun News Pictorial forerunner of the Heralds, where I was in sub editing, and we would take that copy and I would then rewrite it and change it. John would add things. If Chop mentions a policeman or another crook, John would add stuff about that person to fatten it out, to give more context and more detail.

I would then take that and fatten it up again and polish it and give it more shape, so it comes out more like a real story written by a writer, but still recognizably Choppers memories. This is actually what ghostwriters do. We were doing precisely a ghost writing job, where we took the original from the talent, the footballer or the crook or the jockey, and we turned it into something more readable. And it was still pretty rough, i have to say, because we were doing this at midnight and

doing the best we could. And long story short, we went to a guy who worked in newspapers at Dandy Kong for the Danny Noong Journal, and one weekend we went there and we got a lot of hamburgers and beer and coca cola and bad stuff like that, and we locked ourselves in for the weekend and we produced

this book. It was done in what they call cold metal, which meant cutting it out with scalpels and laying it out in pages and forms as books were done in those days and newspapers, and we laid out this entire book in the weekend and it was a rough little book called Chopper from the Inside, and that became the first and best Classic Chopper book and we printed it at our own expense because we were backing this one. I think I got an overdraft of five thousand dollars

which I still have, and we printed it. The glue in the book wasn't good. It was a cheap edition with cheap paper and the pages were falling out. We were selling it around for around the twelve dollar mark or something, which in those days was the low end of the paperback market, about like twenty eight bucks now, and they were falling apart all over Australia, these things. But they were selling and the more they saw, the

more they fell apart. The more they fell apart, the more people went back and brought another one because they weren't that expensive that they couldn't afford to go and get another one. And so ow falling apart, rough little book full of errors and all sorts of stuff about a bloke with noe's who just got out of jail.

At this stage it became a legitimate bestseller. And we realized this when we looked at the news footage on TV and saw the Australian cricket team getting off the plane at Heathrow in London and all of them are carrying the Chopper Book. They'd been reading it on the way over. It became a cult book, and that, in a long elongated nutshell, is how we created the Chopper Book. It was rough and tough, it was genuinely funny. The

best bits in it were Choppers jokes. We did jokes and we added stuff, but the funniest stuff in it was Chopper and it actually established a genre, or helped to establish a genre in publishing true crime that predated Quentin Tarantino and reservoir dogs and all that sort of stuff. So we actually lay claim to having helped invent that genre in our little corner of the world.