Speaker 1: Chopper couldn't spell unless he was spelling the names of
Speaker 1: guns or things like mesha schmids. He could always spell those.
Speaker 1: Billy got hold of a cult forty five pistol and
Speaker 1: taught himself to shoot really well, and so when people
Speaker 1: started to shoot at him, they would miss at fifteen
Speaker 1: meters or twenty meters and he would hit them. And
Speaker 1: we laid out this entire book in a weekend, and
Speaker 1: it was a rough little book called Chopper from the Inside,
Speaker 1: and that became the first and best classic Chopper book.
Speaker 1: This is Life and Crimes. I'm Andrew Rule, and we're
Speaker 1: looking at more reader questions from our mailbag.
Speaker 2: And I'm not Andrew of all. My name's Johnny Burton.
Speaker 2: I'm the producer of the show, and I shall ask
Speaker 2: the questions. Now, you can have four guests for dinner,
Speaker 2: all of those you have written about over the years.
Speaker 2: Who would they be and why? And while you draw
Speaker 2: up to the seating plan there, I'll say that's from
Speaker 2: listener Sharon, four guests, four guests. I also want to know,
Speaker 2: if you have time, what would you have on the menu?
Speaker 1: Sharon asks who I'd invited dinner of the people I've
Speaker 1: written about over the years before I'm going to nominate,
Speaker 1: I knew the more. I had known them all to
Speaker 1: talk to, and they're all engaging and interesting and intelligent
Speaker 1: in their own way. One is the late Billy Longley,
Speaker 1: who was known as the Texan Billy Longley. We've talked
Speaker 1: about him here before. He was the son of a
Speaker 1: tradesman and an English woman or a Scottish woman whose
Speaker 1: father had been a naval captain between the Wars, so
Speaker 1: Billy didn't come from a crime family. Billy did not
Speaker 1: have a tattoo. He was just a tough kid who
Speaker 1: grew up in the Depression out in the inner western
Speaker 1: or northern suburbs ascot Vale area and became a tough
Speaker 1: guy by osmosis really, and the rest of his family
Speaker 1: was pretty respectable. I remember meeting them at his eightieth birthday.
Speaker 1: But Billy was described at that birthday by a former
Speaker 1: governor of Penridge as a straight arrow in a yard
Speaker 1: full of rubbish or something like that. So he impressed people.
Speaker 1: Billy had a deep, strong voice, a commanding presence, and
Speaker 1: absolute gravitas. He had a strong personality and in different
Speaker 1: circumstances would have made an impressive leader in a military sense,
Speaker 1: or in business or something like that. As a crook,
Speaker 1: he was highly disciplined. Other crooks were drunks and idiots
Speaker 1: and lunatics who did mad things. Billy would always think
Speaker 1: things through. Billy got hold of a cult forty five
Speaker 1: pistol and taught himself to shoot really well, and so
Speaker 1: when people started to shoot at him, they would miss
Speaker 1: at fifteen meters or twenty meters, and he would them
Speaker 1: with his shots because he was good at it. He
Speaker 1: would keep his weapons well oiled and in good order,
Speaker 1: which a lot of crooks didn't. He would not drink
Speaker 1: to excess, which a lot of crooks did. This didn't
Speaker 1: make Billy a good bloke or a kind bloke. I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting that he was an upstanding citizen in every way.
Speaker 1: He wasn't. His first wife died in very questionable circumstances,
Speaker 1: although he was cleared of that homicide very well represented
Speaker 1: in court. I think Billy though interesting. Man and Philip Adams,
Speaker 1: the great radio and print man ad Man and soon
Speaker 1: rates Billy as one of the most interesting of the
Speaker 1: many thousands of people that he's interviewed in fifty years.
Speaker 1: Number two on a short list of for Chopper Reid,
Speaker 1: who knew Billy quite well. Chopper Reid was mad and
Speaker 1: bad as a kid, probably mentally disturbed in a way,
Speaker 1: probably had some form of a form of autism or
Speaker 1: something like that. He certainly had been disturbed because his
Speaker 1: mother was pretty well a religious zealot, very straight laced
Speaker 1: woman who was a Seventh Day Adventist. She was the
Speaker 1: daughter of a clergyman and her family were extremely respectable people.
Speaker 1: In fact, Chopper's mother's brother, that is, his uncle, was
Speaker 1: a doctor who became well known for doing a radio show.
Speaker 1: He was known on the radiators I think doctor James Wright,
Speaker 1: which wasn't his actual name, but was famous around Australia
Speaker 1: at one time as a radio doctor who gave advice
Speaker 1: on the radio. His Chopper's sister, Mark Brandon Reid is
Speaker 1: his real name. His sister, respectable woman. Her son I think,
Speaker 1: became a West End producer in London of theater. But
Speaker 1: Chopper's father was a returned World War Two soldier, Keith Reid,
Speaker 1: who I think was a classic disturbed soldier with PTSD
Speaker 1: and had mental issues, and he brought out the worst
Speaker 1: in his son and probably pushed him along the road
Speaker 1: towards the sort of man he became. I have to
Speaker 1: say that Chopper Read hadn't had flat feet. He had
Speaker 1: very flat feet. If he had not had flat feet.
Speaker 1: He was a big, strong, strapping young fellow who could
Speaker 1: shoot really well. Was intelligent in fact, not very literate,
Speaker 1: but intelligent, and would have made an extremely good soldier.
Speaker 1: But he couldn't get into the military because of his feet,
Speaker 1: and that send him down the wrong path. Interesting guy
Speaker 1: could knock out rhyming couplets the way that rappers can.
Speaker 1: In a way, he was like a rapper. He could
Speaker 1: write stuff that rhymed. He was funny. He was a
Speaker 1: very good conversationalist and a good storyteller. And he collected
Speaker 1: a lot of story who is in jail because the
Speaker 1: yarnspinner's in jail, And he collected them and adapted them
Speaker 1: to his own purposes, and they were the basis of
Speaker 1: a lot of what he wrote. Very funny. Going third
Speaker 1: one not so funny, more intense, but intelligent. His name
Speaker 1: was Ray Mooney mn e Y, probably a moody fella.
Speaker 1: Came out of middle class Melbourne, I'd say, from the
Speaker 1: more or less Catholic establishment, from one of a better
Speaker 1: phrase went to one of the better Catholic schools. Was
Speaker 1: a schoolboy athlete of note, as was Andrew Fraser. One
Speaker 1: of probably almost one of the rivals in his era
Speaker 1: was Andrew Fraser from a different school. Ray Mooney I
Speaker 1: think was a crackerjack, runner and all around athlete, probably
Speaker 1: a very good footballer and could fight and do all
Speaker 1: those things. Period physical piece of work went down the
Speaker 1: wrong track. He apparently committed was convicted of quite a
Speaker 1: serious sexual assault. I don't know the circumstances of it.
Speaker 1: It was the sort of crime which could lead to
Speaker 1: people getting very severe sentences in those days for something
Speaker 1: that might or might not have been a severe crime. Now.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the circumstances were, but it's conceivable
Speaker 1: that Ray Mooney was not as guilty as perhaps a
Speaker 1: judge and jury thought he was. It might well have
Speaker 1: something to do, possibly with the identity of the alleged victim.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But he's an intelligent man, an interesting man,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a lot of things, and he still
Speaker 1: writes stuff. But he wrote a novel called A Green Light,
Speaker 1: which was a thinly veiled story about crime in Victoria
Speaker 1: and Australia. The central character of which was clearly his
Speaker 1: good friend in jail, Christopher Dale Flannery, the hitman who
Speaker 1: ended up disappearing in Sydney, was undoubtedly shot dead by
Speaker 1: Bent police in Sydney after becoming too much of a
Speaker 1: danger to a lot of people up there. And Ray Mooney,
Speaker 1: when he published the book way back in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: was at pains to say it was not about Christopher
Speaker 1: Dale Flannery, but years later he said to me, yeah,
Speaker 1: well of course it was. And it's a really effective novel.
Speaker 1: It predates things like reservoir dogs, but it covers that
Speaker 1: sort of territory. It's not the only thing he's done.
Speaker 1: He wrote by something called Every Night, which was the
Speaker 1: basis for a film. He's worked on a lot of
Speaker 1: things and he's highly respected in certain circles. Very interesting man.
Speaker 1: And the fourth one is David McMillan. We call him mcviillaan.
Speaker 1: David McMillan, conman, drug trafficker, half a genius undercover copper
Speaker 1: that I know, said that McMillan was the smartest crime
Speaker 1: he ever met. McMillan, back in the days before computers
Speaker 1: took over, could memorize hundreds of plane timetables so that
Speaker 1: he could work out which plane slanted where and when
Speaker 1: and how you could get off one and on another.
Speaker 1: And he did this because he worked out how he
Speaker 1: could get a heap of false identities, which he did
Speaker 1: by pretending to be someone who was dead. He would
Speaker 1: go and find graves of little children that had died
Speaker 1: back in the same year when he was born, back
Speaker 1: in late fifties, and he would assume those identities, and
Speaker 1: he would get passports and bank accounts and other things
Speaker 1: in those identities and build them up so that when
Speaker 1: he traveled overseas where he would pick up drugs, don't
Speaker 1: worry about that. He was an absolute villain. He would
Speaker 1: pick up drugs, or he would send other people couriers
Speaker 1: to pick up drugs. And when he got to somewhere
Speaker 1: where he was in our drug sort of venue, like
Speaker 1: Thailand or Burma or something like that, he would then
Speaker 1: fly out of there on a different passport and go
Speaker 1: to London, and he would swap identities around so that
Speaker 1: when he was coming back to Australia it would appear
Speaker 1: that he had not been in the drug related place,
Speaker 1: but had been in somewhere innocuous like Holland or Sweden
Speaker 1: or something like that, and that meant it was much
Speaker 1: easier for him to bring back drugs hidden in luggage
Speaker 1: or in goods that he had sent back, and he
Speaker 1: and his friends, a friend of his called Sullivan. Sullivan
Speaker 1: had been a champion schoolboy pole vaulter. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 1: We've now got three people that I've mentioned here today
Speaker 1: that were champion schoolboy athletes. McMillan's friend was a dinky
Speaker 1: die champion schoolboy Paul Volter. His old coach told me
Speaker 1: that if he hadn't broken his ankle or a leg
Speaker 1: or something as a teenager, he would have gone to
Speaker 1: the Olympics and been one of the best in the
Speaker 1: world because he was an elite athlete. But the injury
Speaker 1: meant he couldn't go on with it. And the injury
Speaker 1: was so painful that he sought drugs to alleviate the pain,
Speaker 1: and that led him down the path of using drugs,
Speaker 1: which led him to form an alliance with David McMillan,
Speaker 1: which ultimately destroyed them both. They became addicts, they got caught,
Speaker 1: they went to jail, and their lives turned to absolute ruin.
Speaker 1: McMillan is still alive over in the UK somewhere, but
Speaker 1: he's been in and out of jail around the world
Speaker 1: for all these years. I did publish a book by
Speaker 1: him called mcvillain. He was a most engaging correspondent. He
Speaker 1: was a liar and a con man, and a cheat
Speaker 1: and a fraud, but he could write really well and
Speaker 1: is a very funny, astute fellow and a very acute
Speaker 1: observer of the criminal millieu. He would be a good
Speaker 1: man to have at that table. However, the problem, Sharon
Speaker 1: with having four people like that at the table is
Speaker 1: that they would compete for airspace with each other, and
Speaker 1: they'd want to show off and try and stand over
Speaker 1: each other and stare each other down, and inevitably what
Speaker 1: would happen would be that probably Billy Longley and Ray
Speaker 1: Mooney would end up butting horns with the others. McMillan
Speaker 1: would sit back and take notes because he wasn't a
Speaker 1: tough guy. He was a thinker and a funny guy
Speaker 1: and a conman. The conversation might end up a bit
Speaker 1: one sided at that dinner party and might be as
Speaker 1: enjoyable as perhaps you might think, because what those guys
Speaker 1: need is an audience and what they don't like is
Speaker 1: an audience that's competing with them. The food I would
Speaker 1: select for them would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
Speaker 2: We should say that we've had episodes on Shopper, which
Speaker 2: I think we may have called Shopper. We've had an
Speaker 2: episode on Billy Longley which we call The Texan, and
Speaker 2: we have an episode on McMillan, which we of course
Speaker 2: called mcvillain, and you can find those in your podcast feed.
Speaker 2: Going on from that question one from Pat, and it
Speaker 2: talks about one of your dinner guests there. Pat is
Speaker 2: interested to hear what you did in and around writing
Speaker 2: the Chopper books. Was there a lot to clean up
Speaker 2: of his copy? How did that come together? Was he
Speaker 2: telling tales far from the truth? And what did you
Speaker 2: think about the book after we'd been published.
Speaker 1: Well, the first thing Pat is to declare that it
Speaker 1: was a joint effort by John Sylvestro and myself with
Speaker 1: Mark Brandon Reid, who at the time was serving one
Speaker 1: of his many long sentences in Penridge. John Sylvester, who
Speaker 1: then worked at the forerunner to this paper, the Old
Speaker 1: Sun News Pictorial, he was a career crime writer from
Speaker 1: the start. Johnny was sent to police rounds in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, forty five years ago, and as he recently wrote,
Speaker 1: he never really left. And John has become that rare
Speaker 1: person that has been a police and crime reporter all
Speaker 1: his career. He's a specialist. He knows crooks, he knows coppers.
Speaker 1: He's the son of a former senior policeman, the late
Speaker 1: Fred Silvester, who was an assistant commissioner. And John is
Speaker 1: an astute observer of the scene, very good speaker, very
Speaker 1: funny man himself. He tells the story of going out
Speaker 1: to Pendridge to interview Chopper Read and being ushered into
Speaker 1: a small room and instead of shaking hands, Chopper reaches
Speaker 1: out and grabs John's thumb and places that thumb on
Speaker 1: a small oppression in Chopper's head and said, he said,
Speaker 1: that's where the ice pick went in. And John said
Speaker 1: something like, well, mostly on the outside we shake hands,
Speaker 1: but if you want to show me the scar in
Speaker 1: your head where the ice pick went in, that's fine.
Speaker 1: That's fine by mate. And so they talked away. John
Speaker 1: wrote a story, and the story writ in the paper,
Speaker 1: and it was a good story. It was an interesting story,
Speaker 1: and it pleased the editor and please John, please, I
Speaker 1: think might please chop a read. Even though it was
Speaker 1: fairly negative towards him, it didn't please the authorities who
Speaker 1: gave him another six months. I think was one of
Speaker 1: the problems. But Chopper put the hard word on. Johnny said, look,
Speaker 1: I realized that the most famous crooks are the ones
Speaker 1: who were written about that in the Old West. The
Speaker 1: ones who got well known, Believe the Kid and all
Speaker 1: the rest of them were the ones that the knock
Speaker 1: about reporters wrote Penny dreadful about them, masters and all
Speaker 1: those Old West names. He wanted to be well known
Speaker 1: like those guys. He wanted to be the best known
Speaker 1: crooks and Squeze Tailor and Ned Kelly. And he realized
Speaker 1: the only way to do that was to tell stories
Speaker 1: and have them in the media, in newspapers as he
Speaker 1: saw it then, and he said, I want you to
Speaker 1: write a book about me. I'll come out and we'll
Speaker 1: get some pizzes and beer and tape recorder and I'll
Speaker 1: record it and he'll turn it into a book. And
Speaker 1: John drew himself up to his full six foot and
Speaker 1: half an inch and said, no, you won't. If you
Speaker 1: want to write a book, you write yourself. And so
Speaker 1: Chopper gets some penridge, prison notepaper and a biro and
Speaker 1: he sits up against his television in his cell at
Speaker 1: night with the faint light of the TV, and he
Speaker 1: starts writing. Now to answer the question, his writing was
Speaker 1: very primitive, big ugly letters, really bad spelling. It looked
Speaker 1: like the writing of someone who'd stopped learning to write
Speaker 1: in a grade four or five, which is possibly true.
Speaker 1: But the fact that Chopper couldn't spell unless he was
Speaker 1: spelling the names of guns or things like mesha schmids.
Speaker 1: He could always spell those, but he's spelling was really
Speaker 1: idiosyncratic and crazy, very primitive forming of letters. But he
Speaker 1: was funny and he told stories that were funny, and
Speaker 1: many of them were his own stories, some he borrowed
Speaker 1: from others. He'd say, well, I was talking to Ray
Speaker 1: Chuck the other day, whe I was talking to someone
Speaker 1: and they told me this. And he would take the
Speaker 1: stories of other people and tell them and he was
Speaker 1: really good at it. And I have to say that
Speaker 1: when he started sending these letters in to John at
Speaker 1: the newspaper, every day, there'd be another one. Every day
Speaker 1: there'd be another one, and John open them up and
Speaker 1: come over and say this mad bugger's he is writing stuff. Look,
Speaker 1: he's one about his child, it is one about his dad,
Speaker 1: he's one about when he stole his first bike. Whatever.
Speaker 1: And indeed he wrote enough material that John and I,
Speaker 1: who had just decided to write a book together, a
Speaker 1: different book. We were going to call it. I think
Speaker 1: we're going to call it Bent, and it was going
Speaker 1: to be a fictionalized novel about Bent Coppis. I think
Speaker 1: we'd written one page of that together, because I'd published
Speaker 1: a book at this dage, and John realized that together
Speaker 1: we might be able to do something. We said, let's
Speaker 1: chuck in our thing and do Chopper because it's there,
Speaker 1: it's easy to do, and it's hitting the pigeon hole
Speaker 1: every day. And so John would get these letters and
Speaker 1: he would just type them up roughly in the system
Speaker 1: at the Sun News Pictorial forerunner of the Heralds, where
Speaker 1: I was in sub editing, and we would take that
Speaker 1: copy and I would then rewrite it and change it.
Speaker 1: John would add things. If Chop mentions a policeman or
Speaker 1: another crook, John would add stuff about that person to
Speaker 1: fatten it out, to give more context and more detail.
Speaker 1: I would then take that and fatten it up again
Speaker 1: and polish it and give it more shape, so it
Speaker 1: comes out more like a real story written by a writer,
Speaker 1: but still recognizably Choppers memories. This is actually what ghostwriters do.
Speaker 1: We were doing precisely a ghost writing job, where we
Speaker 1: took the original from the talent, the footballer or the
Speaker 1: crook or the jockey, and we turned it into something
Speaker 1: more readable. And it was still pretty rough, i have
Speaker 1: to say, because we were doing this at midnight and
Speaker 1: doing the best we could. And long story short, we
Speaker 1: went to a guy who worked in newspapers at Dandy
Speaker 1: Kong for the Danny Noong Journal, and one weekend we
Speaker 1: went there and we got a lot of hamburgers and
Speaker 1: beer and coca cola and bad stuff like that, and
Speaker 1: we locked ourselves in for the weekend and we produced
Speaker 1: this book. It was done in what they call cold metal,
Speaker 1: which meant cutting it out with scalpels and laying it
Speaker 1: out in pages and forms as books were done in
Speaker 1: those days and newspapers, and we laid out this entire
Speaker 1: book in the weekend and it was a rough little
Speaker 1: book called Chopper from the Inside, and that became the
Speaker 1: first and best Classic Chopper book and we printed it
Speaker 1: at our own expense because we were backing this one.
Speaker 1: I think I got an overdraft of five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: which I still have, and we printed it. The glue
Speaker 1: in the book wasn't good. It was a cheap edition
Speaker 1: with cheap paper and the pages were falling out. We
Speaker 1: were selling it around for around the twelve dollar mark
Speaker 1: or something, which in those days was the low end
Speaker 1: of the paperback market, about like twenty eight bucks now,
Speaker 1: and they were falling apart all over Australia, these things.
Speaker 1: But they were selling and the more they saw, the
Speaker 1: more they fell apart. The more they fell apart, the
Speaker 1: more people went back and brought another one because they
Speaker 1: weren't that expensive that they couldn't afford to go and
Speaker 1: get another one. And so ow falling apart, rough little
Speaker 1: book full of errors and all sorts of stuff about
Speaker 1: a bloke with noe's who just got out of jail.
Speaker 1: At this stage it became a legitimate bestseller. And we
Speaker 1: realized this when we looked at the news footage on
Speaker 1: TV and saw the Australian cricket team getting off the
Speaker 1: plane at Heathrow in London and all of them are
Speaker 1: carrying the Chopper Book. They'd been reading it on the
Speaker 1: way over. It became a cult book, and that, in
Speaker 1: a long elongated nutshell, is how we created the Chopper Book.
Speaker 1: It was rough and tough, it was genuinely funny. The
Speaker 1: best bits in it were Choppers jokes. We did jokes
Speaker 1: and we added stuff, but the funniest stuff in it
Speaker 1: was Chopper and it actually established a genre, or helped
Speaker 1: to establish a genre in publishing true crime that predated
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino and reservoir dogs and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: So we actually lay claim to having helped invent that
Speaker 1: genre in our little corner of the world.
Speaker 2: Thanks to everyone for writing in now. This was just
Speaker 2: a smattering of some of the questions that we've had
Speaker 2: in the mailbag. And keep those questions coming because we're
Speaker 2: going to be doing these question and answer shows more often.
Speaker 2: So if your question wasn't answered and you've already written
Speaker 2: it in, or if you haven't written your question but
Speaker 2: really should, you should do that now and send it
Speaker 2: to Life and Crimes at news dot com dot au
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 1: Will look forward to answering them. Thanks for listening. Life
Speaker 1: and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True
Speaker 1: Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
Speaker 1: features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au,
Speaker 1: forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go
Speaker 1: to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au.
Speaker 1: That is all one word news podcasts sold And if
Speaker 1: you want further information about this episode, links are in
Speaker 1: the description.