WEBVTT - Summer Q and A: Part 2 0:00:01.600 --> 0:00:04.600 Chopper couldn't spell unless he was spelling the names of 0:00:04.720 --> 0:00:07.840 guns or things like mesha schmids. He could always spell those. 0:00:08.200 --> 0:00:11.240 Billy got hold of a cult forty five pistol and 0:00:11.320 --> 0:00:15.320 taught himself to shoot really well, and so when people 0:00:15.320 --> 0:00:17.640 started to shoot at him, they would miss at fifteen 0:00:17.720 --> 0:00:20.479 meters or twenty meters and he would hit them. And 0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:22.639 we laid out this entire book in a weekend, and 0:00:22.720 --> 0:00:26.680 it was a rough little book called Chopper from the Inside, 0:00:26.680 --> 0:00:29.840 and that became the first and best classic Chopper book. 0:00:30.320 --> 0:00:33.280 This is Life and Crimes. I'm Andrew Rule, and we're 0:00:33.320 --> 0:00:37.400 looking at more reader questions from our mailbag. 0:00:38.200 --> 0:00:40.400 And I'm not Andrew of all. My name's Johnny Burton. 0:00:40.479 --> 0:00:42.560 I'm the producer of the show, and I shall ask 0:00:42.640 --> 0:00:45.960 the questions. Now, you can have four guests for dinner, 0:00:46.440 --> 0:00:48.640 all of those you have written about over the years. 0:00:49.320 --> 0:00:52.760 Who would they be and why? And while you draw 0:00:52.840 --> 0:00:55.960 up to the seating plan there, I'll say that's from 0:00:56.240 --> 0:01:00.720 listener Sharon, four guests, four guests. I also want to know, 0:01:00.800 --> 0:01:03.360 if you have time, what would you have on the menu? 0:01:06.240 --> 0:01:09.920 Sharon asks who I'd invited dinner of the people I've 0:01:09.959 --> 0:01:13.560 written about over the years before I'm going to nominate, 0:01:14.280 --> 0:01:17.679 I knew the more. I had known them all to 0:01:17.800 --> 0:01:21.360 talk to, and they're all engaging and interesting and intelligent 0:01:21.440 --> 0:01:24.520 in their own way. One is the late Billy Longley, 0:01:24.760 --> 0:01:28.240 who was known as the Texan Billy Longley. We've talked 0:01:28.240 --> 0:01:31.400 about him here before. He was the son of a 0:01:31.520 --> 0:01:35.600 tradesman and an English woman or a Scottish woman whose 0:01:35.640 --> 0:01:40.000 father had been a naval captain between the Wars, so 0:01:40.080 --> 0:01:43.240 Billy didn't come from a crime family. Billy did not 0:01:43.440 --> 0:01:48.400 have a tattoo. He was just a tough kid who 0:01:48.400 --> 0:01:52.360 grew up in the Depression out in the inner western 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:57.400 or northern suburbs ascot Vale area and became a tough 0:01:57.400 --> 0:02:01.240 guy by osmosis really, and the rest of his family 0:02:01.360 --> 0:02:05.160 was pretty respectable. I remember meeting them at his eightieth birthday. 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:10.400 But Billy was described at that birthday by a former 0:02:10.720 --> 0:02:15.919 governor of Penridge as a straight arrow in a yard 0:02:15.960 --> 0:02:19.519 full of rubbish or something like that. So he impressed people. 0:02:19.720 --> 0:02:24.600 Billy had a deep, strong voice, a commanding presence, and 0:02:25.080 --> 0:02:29.920 absolute gravitas. He had a strong personality and in different 0:02:29.960 --> 0:02:36.200 circumstances would have made an impressive leader in a military sense, 0:02:36.400 --> 0:02:39.320 or in business or something like that. As a crook, 0:02:39.400 --> 0:02:43.200 he was highly disciplined. Other crooks were drunks and idiots 0:02:43.360 --> 0:02:47.000 and lunatics who did mad things. Billy would always think 0:02:47.040 --> 0:02:50.160 things through. Billy got hold of a cult forty five 0:02:50.240 --> 0:02:54.000 pistol and taught himself to shoot really well, and so 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:57.280 when people started to shoot at him, they would miss 0:02:57.320 --> 0:03:00.600 at fifteen meters or twenty meters, and he would them 0:03:00.880 --> 0:03:03.520 with his shots because he was good at it. He 0:03:03.560 --> 0:03:07.400 would keep his weapons well oiled and in good order, 0:03:07.600 --> 0:03:10.960 which a lot of crooks didn't. He would not drink 0:03:11.000 --> 0:03:13.840 to excess, which a lot of crooks did. This didn't 0:03:13.840 --> 0:03:16.919 make Billy a good bloke or a kind bloke. I'm 0:03:16.919 --> 0:03:20.200 not suggesting that he was an upstanding citizen in every way. 0:03:20.400 --> 0:03:25.200 He wasn't. His first wife died in very questionable circumstances, 0:03:25.200 --> 0:03:29.160 although he was cleared of that homicide very well represented 0:03:29.200 --> 0:03:33.800 in court. I think Billy though interesting. Man and Philip Adams, 0:03:33.840 --> 0:03:36.960 the great radio and print man ad Man and soon 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:40.880 rates Billy as one of the most interesting of the 0:03:40.920 --> 0:03:44.680 many thousands of people that he's interviewed in fifty years. 0:03:45.560 --> 0:03:49.200 Number two on a short list of for Chopper Reid, 0:03:49.600 --> 0:03:53.000 who knew Billy quite well. Chopper Reid was mad and 0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:55.840 bad as a kid, probably mentally disturbed in a way, 0:03:56.600 --> 0:04:00.200 probably had some form of a form of autism or 0:04:00.240 --> 0:04:03.440 something like that. He certainly had been disturbed because his 0:04:03.560 --> 0:04:08.000 mother was pretty well a religious zealot, very straight laced 0:04:08.040 --> 0:04:11.480 woman who was a Seventh Day Adventist. She was the 0:04:11.560 --> 0:04:17.880 daughter of a clergyman and her family were extremely respectable people. 0:04:18.240 --> 0:04:23.760 In fact, Chopper's mother's brother, that is, his uncle, was 0:04:24.160 --> 0:04:27.880 a doctor who became well known for doing a radio show. 0:04:28.200 --> 0:04:31.599 He was known on the radiators I think doctor James Wright, 0:04:32.200 --> 0:04:35.760 which wasn't his actual name, but was famous around Australia 0:04:35.800 --> 0:04:38.400 at one time as a radio doctor who gave advice 0:04:38.440 --> 0:04:42.039 on the radio. His Chopper's sister, Mark Brandon Reid is 0:04:42.080 --> 0:04:46.480 his real name. His sister, respectable woman. Her son I think, 0:04:47.360 --> 0:04:53.120 became a West End producer in London of theater. But 0:04:53.240 --> 0:04:57.919 Chopper's father was a returned World War Two soldier, Keith Reid, 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:03.280 who I think was a classic disturbed soldier with PTSD 0:05:04.360 --> 0:05:09.320 and had mental issues, and he brought out the worst 0:05:09.880 --> 0:05:14.280 in his son and probably pushed him along the road 0:05:14.320 --> 0:05:17.760 towards the sort of man he became. I have to 0:05:17.760 --> 0:05:20.719 say that Chopper Read hadn't had flat feet. He had 0:05:20.839 --> 0:05:23.719 very flat feet. If he had not had flat feet. 0:05:23.960 --> 0:05:27.480 He was a big, strong, strapping young fellow who could 0:05:27.480 --> 0:05:32.560 shoot really well. Was intelligent in fact, not very literate, 0:05:32.600 --> 0:05:36.479 but intelligent, and would have made an extremely good soldier. 0:05:36.520 --> 0:05:39.119 But he couldn't get into the military because of his feet, 0:05:39.600 --> 0:05:43.280 and that send him down the wrong path. Interesting guy 0:05:44.279 --> 0:05:48.599 could knock out rhyming couplets the way that rappers can. 0:05:48.880 --> 0:05:51.720 In a way, he was like a rapper. He could 0:05:51.720 --> 0:05:55.080 write stuff that rhymed. He was funny. He was a 0:05:55.240 --> 0:05:59.360 very good conversationalist and a good storyteller. And he collected 0:05:59.440 --> 0:06:01.359 a lot of story who is in jail because the 0:06:01.520 --> 0:06:05.120 yarnspinner's in jail, And he collected them and adapted them 0:06:05.160 --> 0:06:07.800 to his own purposes, and they were the basis of 0:06:08.080 --> 0:06:11.559 a lot of what he wrote. Very funny. Going third 0:06:11.600 --> 0:06:16.479 one not so funny, more intense, but intelligent. His name 0:06:16.560 --> 0:06:21.159 was Ray Mooney mn e Y, probably a moody fella. 0:06:21.560 --> 0:06:25.000 Came out of middle class Melbourne, I'd say, from the 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:28.120 more or less Catholic establishment, from one of a better 0:06:28.160 --> 0:06:31.640 phrase went to one of the better Catholic schools. Was 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:37.000 a schoolboy athlete of note, as was Andrew Fraser. One 0:06:37.040 --> 0:06:41.320 of probably almost one of the rivals in his era 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:45.960 was Andrew Fraser from a different school. Ray Mooney I 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:50.520 think was a crackerjack, runner and all around athlete, probably 0:06:50.560 --> 0:06:53.880 a very good footballer and could fight and do all 0:06:53.920 --> 0:06:58.120 those things. Period physical piece of work went down the 0:06:58.160 --> 0:07:02.360 wrong track. He apparently committed was convicted of quite a 0:07:02.400 --> 0:07:07.160 serious sexual assault. I don't know the circumstances of it. 0:07:07.160 --> 0:07:10.880 It was the sort of crime which could lead to 0:07:10.880 --> 0:07:15.200 people getting very severe sentences in those days for something 0:07:15.240 --> 0:07:19.840 that might or might not have been a severe crime. Now. 0:07:20.080 --> 0:07:24.080 I don't know what the circumstances were, but it's conceivable 0:07:24.120 --> 0:07:28.760 that Ray Mooney was not as guilty as perhaps a 0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:32.440 judge and jury thought he was. It might well have 0:07:32.600 --> 0:07:37.920 something to do, possibly with the identity of the alleged victim. 0:07:38.400 --> 0:07:43.400 I don't know. But he's an intelligent man, an interesting man, 0:07:43.440 --> 0:07:46.400 and he wrote a lot of things, and he still 0:07:46.400 --> 0:07:50.080 writes stuff. But he wrote a novel called A Green Light, 0:07:51.000 --> 0:07:56.320 which was a thinly veiled story about crime in Victoria 0:07:56.400 --> 0:08:01.960 and Australia. The central character of which was clearly his 0:08:02.120 --> 0:08:06.600 good friend in jail, Christopher Dale Flannery, the hitman who 0:08:06.720 --> 0:08:11.880 ended up disappearing in Sydney, was undoubtedly shot dead by 0:08:11.880 --> 0:08:15.880 Bent police in Sydney after becoming too much of a 0:08:16.000 --> 0:08:19.760 danger to a lot of people up there. And Ray Mooney, 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:23.800 when he published the book way back in the late eighties, 0:08:24.080 --> 0:08:26.200 was at pains to say it was not about Christopher 0:08:26.240 --> 0:08:29.160 Dale Flannery, but years later he said to me, yeah, 0:08:29.160 --> 0:08:33.280 well of course it was. And it's a really effective novel. 0:08:33.480 --> 0:08:38.400 It predates things like reservoir dogs, but it covers that 0:08:38.440 --> 0:08:41.800 sort of territory. It's not the only thing he's done. 0:08:41.880 --> 0:08:44.400 He wrote by something called Every Night, which was the 0:08:44.400 --> 0:08:46.880 basis for a film. He's worked on a lot of 0:08:46.920 --> 0:08:51.360 things and he's highly respected in certain circles. Very interesting man. 0:08:52.600 --> 0:08:57.040 And the fourth one is David McMillan. We call him mcviillaan. 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:03.400 David McMillan, conman, drug trafficker, half a genius undercover copper 0:09:03.440 --> 0:09:06.640 that I know, said that McMillan was the smartest crime 0:09:06.679 --> 0:09:10.000 he ever met. McMillan, back in the days before computers 0:09:10.040 --> 0:09:15.360 took over, could memorize hundreds of plane timetables so that 0:09:15.440 --> 0:09:18.320 he could work out which plane slanted where and when 0:09:18.400 --> 0:09:20.520 and how you could get off one and on another. 0:09:21.160 --> 0:09:24.640 And he did this because he worked out how he 0:09:24.679 --> 0:09:28.079 could get a heap of false identities, which he did 0:09:28.120 --> 0:09:31.400 by pretending to be someone who was dead. He would 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:34.960 go and find graves of little children that had died 0:09:35.520 --> 0:09:38.440 back in the same year when he was born, back 0:09:38.480 --> 0:09:43.960 in late fifties, and he would assume those identities, and 0:09:43.960 --> 0:09:48.200 he would get passports and bank accounts and other things 0:09:48.240 --> 0:09:50.840 in those identities and build them up so that when 0:09:50.840 --> 0:09:53.400 he traveled overseas where he would pick up drugs, don't 0:09:53.400 --> 0:09:57.440 worry about that. He was an absolute villain. He would 0:09:57.440 --> 0:10:00.480 pick up drugs, or he would send other people couriers 0:10:00.480 --> 0:10:03.679 to pick up drugs. And when he got to somewhere 0:10:03.720 --> 0:10:06.560 where he was in our drug sort of venue, like 0:10:06.679 --> 0:10:10.760 Thailand or Burma or something like that, he would then 0:10:10.840 --> 0:10:13.480 fly out of there on a different passport and go 0:10:13.600 --> 0:10:17.240 to London, and he would swap identities around so that 0:10:17.640 --> 0:10:20.800 when he was coming back to Australia it would appear 0:10:21.440 --> 0:10:26.040 that he had not been in the drug related place, 0:10:26.160 --> 0:10:30.679 but had been in somewhere innocuous like Holland or Sweden 0:10:30.800 --> 0:10:33.719 or something like that, and that meant it was much 0:10:33.800 --> 0:10:38.400 easier for him to bring back drugs hidden in luggage 0:10:38.480 --> 0:10:42.120 or in goods that he had sent back, and he 0:10:42.240 --> 0:10:45.800 and his friends, a friend of his called Sullivan. Sullivan 0:10:46.320 --> 0:10:50.920 had been a champion schoolboy pole vaulter. Now here's the thing. 0:10:51.200 --> 0:10:54.760 We've now got three people that I've mentioned here today 0:10:55.320 --> 0:11:00.680 that were champion schoolboy athletes. McMillan's friend was a dinky 0:11:00.760 --> 0:11:04.240 die champion schoolboy Paul Volter. His old coach told me 0:11:04.960 --> 0:11:07.680 that if he hadn't broken his ankle or a leg 0:11:07.800 --> 0:11:11.319 or something as a teenager, he would have gone to 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:13.600 the Olympics and been one of the best in the 0:11:13.600 --> 0:11:18.960 world because he was an elite athlete. But the injury 0:11:19.520 --> 0:11:21.520 meant he couldn't go on with it. And the injury 0:11:22.120 --> 0:11:26.240 was so painful that he sought drugs to alleviate the pain, 0:11:26.640 --> 0:11:29.720 and that led him down the path of using drugs, 0:11:29.720 --> 0:11:33.640 which led him to form an alliance with David McMillan, 0:11:34.120 --> 0:11:39.240 which ultimately destroyed them both. They became addicts, they got caught, 0:11:39.320 --> 0:11:43.079 they went to jail, and their lives turned to absolute ruin. 0:11:43.520 --> 0:11:47.680 McMillan is still alive over in the UK somewhere, but 0:11:47.760 --> 0:11:50.520 he's been in and out of jail around the world 0:11:50.559 --> 0:11:54.320 for all these years. I did publish a book by 0:11:54.400 --> 0:11:58.679 him called mcvillain. He was a most engaging correspondent. He 0:11:58.880 --> 0:12:01.520 was a liar and a con man, and a cheat 0:12:02.080 --> 0:12:05.200 and a fraud, but he could write really well and 0:12:06.200 --> 0:12:10.679 is a very funny, astute fellow and a very acute 0:12:10.720 --> 0:12:16.480 observer of the criminal millieu. He would be a good 0:12:16.520 --> 0:12:19.960 man to have at that table. However, the problem, Sharon 0:12:20.040 --> 0:12:22.160 with having four people like that at the table is 0:12:22.400 --> 0:12:26.480 that they would compete for airspace with each other, and 0:12:26.520 --> 0:12:28.760 they'd want to show off and try and stand over 0:12:28.800 --> 0:12:31.960 each other and stare each other down, and inevitably what 0:12:32.000 --> 0:12:35.280 would happen would be that probably Billy Longley and Ray 0:12:35.360 --> 0:12:39.120 Mooney would end up butting horns with the others. McMillan 0:12:39.160 --> 0:12:41.560 would sit back and take notes because he wasn't a 0:12:41.600 --> 0:12:44.719 tough guy. He was a thinker and a funny guy 0:12:44.760 --> 0:12:48.200 and a conman. The conversation might end up a bit 0:12:48.240 --> 0:12:51.120 one sided at that dinner party and might be as 0:12:51.200 --> 0:12:56.319 enjoyable as perhaps you might think, because what those guys 0:12:56.360 --> 0:12:59.559 need is an audience and what they don't like is 0:12:59.559 --> 0:13:03.400 an audience that's competing with them. The food I would 0:13:03.400 --> 0:13:06.840 select for them would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. 0:13:07.120 --> 0:13:10.880 We should say that we've had episodes on Shopper, which 0:13:10.880 --> 0:13:13.280 I think we may have called Shopper. We've had an 0:13:13.280 --> 0:13:17.000 episode on Billy Longley which we call The Texan, and 0:13:17.040 --> 0:13:20.079 we have an episode on McMillan, which we of course 0:13:20.120 --> 0:13:23.920 called mcvillain, and you can find those in your podcast feed. 0:13:24.360 --> 0:13:27.960 Going on from that question one from Pat, and it 0:13:28.000 --> 0:13:30.360 talks about one of your dinner guests there. Pat is 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:33.920 interested to hear what you did in and around writing 0:13:33.960 --> 0:13:37.160 the Chopper books. Was there a lot to clean up 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:41.400 of his copy? How did that come together? Was he 0:13:41.720 --> 0:13:44.600 telling tales far from the truth? And what did you 0:13:44.640 --> 0:13:46.360 think about the book after we'd been published. 0:13:47.559 --> 0:13:50.200 Well, the first thing Pat is to declare that it 0:13:50.280 --> 0:13:53.280 was a joint effort by John Sylvestro and myself with 0:13:53.880 --> 0:13:57.280 Mark Brandon Reid, who at the time was serving one 0:13:57.320 --> 0:14:00.560 of his many long sentences in Penridge. John Sylvester, who 0:14:00.600 --> 0:14:03.440 then worked at the forerunner to this paper, the Old 0:14:03.520 --> 0:14:07.360 Sun News Pictorial, he was a career crime writer from 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:10.360 the start. Johnny was sent to police rounds in nineteen 0:14:10.480 --> 0:14:14.640 seventy eight, forty five years ago, and as he recently wrote, 0:14:14.760 --> 0:14:19.440 he never really left. And John has become that rare 0:14:19.800 --> 0:14:23.880 person that has been a police and crime reporter all 0:14:23.920 --> 0:14:28.200 his career. He's a specialist. He knows crooks, he knows coppers. 0:14:28.800 --> 0:14:31.800 He's the son of a former senior policeman, the late 0:14:32.200 --> 0:14:36.920 Fred Silvester, who was an assistant commissioner. And John is 0:14:37.640 --> 0:14:42.160 an astute observer of the scene, very good speaker, very 0:14:42.160 --> 0:14:45.720 funny man himself. He tells the story of going out 0:14:45.760 --> 0:14:50.080 to Pendridge to interview Chopper Read and being ushered into 0:14:50.080 --> 0:14:54.680 a small room and instead of shaking hands, Chopper reaches 0:14:54.720 --> 0:14:59.120 out and grabs John's thumb and places that thumb on 0:14:59.240 --> 0:15:02.440 a small oppression in Chopper's head and said, he said, 0:15:02.480 --> 0:15:05.400 that's where the ice pick went in. And John said 0:15:05.440 --> 0:15:08.520 something like, well, mostly on the outside we shake hands, 0:15:08.520 --> 0:15:10.920 but if you want to show me the scar in 0:15:10.920 --> 0:15:13.480 your head where the ice pick went in, that's fine. 0:15:13.920 --> 0:15:16.920 That's fine by mate. And so they talked away. John 0:15:16.960 --> 0:15:19.440 wrote a story, and the story writ in the paper, 0:15:19.480 --> 0:15:22.080 and it was a good story. It was an interesting story, 0:15:22.120 --> 0:15:26.520 and it pleased the editor and please John, please, I 0:15:26.520 --> 0:15:29.400 think might please chop a read. Even though it was 0:15:29.440 --> 0:15:34.360 fairly negative towards him, it didn't please the authorities who 0:15:34.480 --> 0:15:36.560 gave him another six months. I think was one of 0:15:36.560 --> 0:15:40.640 the problems. But Chopper put the hard word on. Johnny said, look, 0:15:40.920 --> 0:15:46.560 I realized that the most famous crooks are the ones 0:15:46.600 --> 0:15:49.840 who were written about that in the Old West. The 0:15:49.880 --> 0:15:52.880 ones who got well known, Believe the Kid and all 0:15:52.920 --> 0:15:55.520 the rest of them were the ones that the knock 0:15:55.520 --> 0:16:00.800 about reporters wrote Penny dreadful about them, masters and all 0:16:00.840 --> 0:16:04.680 those Old West names. He wanted to be well known 0:16:05.280 --> 0:16:07.680 like those guys. He wanted to be the best known 0:16:07.760 --> 0:16:10.920 crooks and Squeze Tailor and Ned Kelly. And he realized 0:16:10.960 --> 0:16:13.360 the only way to do that was to tell stories 0:16:13.400 --> 0:16:16.880 and have them in the media, in newspapers as he 0:16:16.960 --> 0:16:20.320 saw it then, and he said, I want you to 0:16:20.360 --> 0:16:22.320 write a book about me. I'll come out and we'll 0:16:22.320 --> 0:16:24.480 get some pizzes and beer and tape recorder and I'll 0:16:24.520 --> 0:16:26.440 record it and he'll turn it into a book. And 0:16:26.560 --> 0:16:29.320 John drew himself up to his full six foot and 0:16:29.720 --> 0:16:32.120 half an inch and said, no, you won't. If you 0:16:32.160 --> 0:16:34.680 want to write a book, you write yourself. And so 0:16:36.000 --> 0:16:40.320 Chopper gets some penridge, prison notepaper and a biro and 0:16:40.360 --> 0:16:43.120 he sits up against his television in his cell at 0:16:43.240 --> 0:16:46.320 night with the faint light of the TV, and he 0:16:46.440 --> 0:16:50.560 starts writing. Now to answer the question, his writing was 0:16:51.000 --> 0:16:55.960 very primitive, big ugly letters, really bad spelling. It looked 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:59.640 like the writing of someone who'd stopped learning to write 0:16:59.680 --> 0:17:03.440 in a grade four or five, which is possibly true. 0:17:03.560 --> 0:17:06.040 But the fact that Chopper couldn't spell unless he was 0:17:06.040 --> 0:17:09.280 spelling the names of guns or things like mesha schmids. 0:17:09.440 --> 0:17:12.919 He could always spell those, but he's spelling was really 0:17:13.240 --> 0:17:18.919 idiosyncratic and crazy, very primitive forming of letters. But he 0:17:19.080 --> 0:17:22.960 was funny and he told stories that were funny, and 0:17:23.760 --> 0:17:25.840 many of them were his own stories, some he borrowed 0:17:25.840 --> 0:17:28.639 from others. He'd say, well, I was talking to Ray 0:17:28.720 --> 0:17:30.720 Chuck the other day, whe I was talking to someone 0:17:31.240 --> 0:17:33.919 and they told me this. And he would take the 0:17:33.960 --> 0:17:37.760 stories of other people and tell them and he was 0:17:37.960 --> 0:17:41.520 really good at it. And I have to say that 0:17:42.119 --> 0:17:46.520 when he started sending these letters in to John at 0:17:46.560 --> 0:17:50.800 the newspaper, every day, there'd be another one. Every day 0:17:50.800 --> 0:17:52.720 there'd be another one, and John open them up and 0:17:52.760 --> 0:17:56.720 come over and say this mad bugger's he is writing stuff. Look, 0:17:56.760 --> 0:17:59.320 he's one about his child, it is one about his dad, 0:17:59.320 --> 0:18:02.440 he's one about when he stole his first bike. Whatever. 0:18:03.760 --> 0:18:08.439 And indeed he wrote enough material that John and I, 0:18:08.520 --> 0:18:12.040 who had just decided to write a book together, a 0:18:12.080 --> 0:18:14.840 different book. We were going to call it. I think 0:18:14.840 --> 0:18:16.840 we're going to call it Bent, and it was going 0:18:16.920 --> 0:18:21.119 to be a fictionalized novel about Bent Coppis. I think 0:18:21.160 --> 0:18:25.880 we'd written one page of that together, because I'd published 0:18:25.920 --> 0:18:28.240 a book at this dage, and John realized that together 0:18:28.320 --> 0:18:31.160 we might be able to do something. We said, let's 0:18:31.560 --> 0:18:34.520 chuck in our thing and do Chopper because it's there, 0:18:34.960 --> 0:18:37.840 it's easy to do, and it's hitting the pigeon hole 0:18:37.880 --> 0:18:41.560 every day. And so John would get these letters and 0:18:41.600 --> 0:18:44.240 he would just type them up roughly in the system 0:18:44.440 --> 0:18:49.560 at the Sun News Pictorial forerunner of the Heralds, where 0:18:49.560 --> 0:18:53.800 I was in sub editing, and we would take that 0:18:54.440 --> 0:18:57.919 copy and I would then rewrite it and change it. 0:18:58.040 --> 0:19:01.760 John would add things. If Chop mentions a policeman or 0:19:01.800 --> 0:19:04.879 another crook, John would add stuff about that person to 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:08.560 fatten it out, to give more context and more detail. 0:19:09.240 --> 0:19:12.399 I would then take that and fatten it up again 0:19:12.560 --> 0:19:15.760 and polish it and give it more shape, so it 0:19:15.800 --> 0:19:18.760 comes out more like a real story written by a writer, 0:19:19.480 --> 0:19:24.679 but still recognizably Choppers memories. This is actually what ghostwriters do. 0:19:24.920 --> 0:19:28.880 We were doing precisely a ghost writing job, where we 0:19:28.960 --> 0:19:32.320 took the original from the talent, the footballer or the 0:19:32.359 --> 0:19:35.439 crook or the jockey, and we turned it into something 0:19:35.760 --> 0:19:38.679 more readable. And it was still pretty rough, i have 0:19:38.760 --> 0:19:41.360 to say, because we were doing this at midnight and 0:19:41.840 --> 0:19:45.560 doing the best we could. And long story short, we 0:19:45.600 --> 0:19:48.720 went to a guy who worked in newspapers at Dandy 0:19:48.760 --> 0:19:51.879 Kong for the Danny Noong Journal, and one weekend we 0:19:51.920 --> 0:19:54.159 went there and we got a lot of hamburgers and 0:19:54.280 --> 0:19:58.239 beer and coca cola and bad stuff like that, and 0:19:58.359 --> 0:20:02.040 we locked ourselves in for the weekend and we produced 0:20:02.480 --> 0:20:05.959 this book. It was done in what they call cold metal, 0:20:06.480 --> 0:20:09.439 which meant cutting it out with scalpels and laying it 0:20:09.480 --> 0:20:12.560 out in pages and forms as books were done in 0:20:12.600 --> 0:20:15.840 those days and newspapers, and we laid out this entire 0:20:15.840 --> 0:20:18.320 book in the weekend and it was a rough little 0:20:18.320 --> 0:20:22.719 book called Chopper from the Inside, and that became the 0:20:22.760 --> 0:20:27.120 first and best Classic Chopper book and we printed it 0:20:27.200 --> 0:20:30.000 at our own expense because we were backing this one. 0:20:30.160 --> 0:20:33.160 I think I got an overdraft of five thousand dollars 0:20:33.200 --> 0:20:37.080 which I still have, and we printed it. The glue 0:20:37.480 --> 0:20:40.640 in the book wasn't good. It was a cheap edition 0:20:40.760 --> 0:20:45.040 with cheap paper and the pages were falling out. We 0:20:45.040 --> 0:20:47.440 were selling it around for around the twelve dollar mark 0:20:47.520 --> 0:20:50.040 or something, which in those days was the low end 0:20:50.200 --> 0:20:53.160 of the paperback market, about like twenty eight bucks now, 0:20:54.440 --> 0:20:58.240 and they were falling apart all over Australia, these things. 0:20:58.320 --> 0:21:00.520 But they were selling and the more they saw, the 0:21:00.520 --> 0:21:02.760 more they fell apart. The more they fell apart, the 0:21:02.760 --> 0:21:05.000 more people went back and brought another one because they 0:21:05.040 --> 0:21:08.119 weren't that expensive that they couldn't afford to go and 0:21:08.119 --> 0:21:12.720 get another one. And so ow falling apart, rough little 0:21:12.720 --> 0:21:16.400 book full of errors and all sorts of stuff about 0:21:16.600 --> 0:21:19.080 a bloke with noe's who just got out of jail. 0:21:19.119 --> 0:21:23.199 At this stage it became a legitimate bestseller. And we 0:21:23.280 --> 0:21:26.480 realized this when we looked at the news footage on 0:21:26.600 --> 0:21:30.399 TV and saw the Australian cricket team getting off the 0:21:30.480 --> 0:21:33.640 plane at Heathrow in London and all of them are 0:21:33.640 --> 0:21:36.760 carrying the Chopper Book. They'd been reading it on the 0:21:36.800 --> 0:21:41.240 way over. It became a cult book, and that, in 0:21:41.440 --> 0:21:46.480 a long elongated nutshell, is how we created the Chopper Book. 0:21:46.880 --> 0:21:50.440 It was rough and tough, it was genuinely funny. The 0:21:50.480 --> 0:21:54.359 best bits in it were Choppers jokes. We did jokes 0:21:54.359 --> 0:21:57.199 and we added stuff, but the funniest stuff in it 0:21:57.280 --> 0:22:03.840 was Chopper and it actually established a genre, or helped 0:22:03.880 --> 0:22:08.560 to establish a genre in publishing true crime that predated 0:22:08.960 --> 0:22:13.200 Quentin Tarantino and reservoir dogs and all that sort of stuff. 0:22:13.400 --> 0:22:19.679 So we actually lay claim to having helped invent that 0:22:19.880 --> 0:22:22.159 genre in our little corner of the world. 0:22:23.040 --> 0:22:26.280 Thanks to everyone for writing in now. This was just 0:22:26.320 --> 0:22:29.440 a smattering of some of the questions that we've had 0:22:29.440 --> 0:22:32.560 in the mailbag. And keep those questions coming because we're 0:22:32.560 --> 0:22:35.440 going to be doing these question and answer shows more often. 0:22:36.119 --> 0:22:40.160 So if your question wasn't answered and you've already written 0:22:40.200 --> 0:22:42.760 it in, or if you haven't written your question but 0:22:42.880 --> 0:22:45.520 really should, you should do that now and send it 0:22:45.600 --> 0:22:48.479 to Life and Crimes at news dot com dot au 0:22:49.000 --> 0:22:49.480 and I. 0:22:49.480 --> 0:22:56.280 Will look forward to answering them. Thanks for listening. Life 0:22:56.320 --> 0:22:59.480 and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True 0:22:59.520 --> 0:23:04.480 Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, 0:23:04.480 --> 0:23:09.040 features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, 0:23:09.520 --> 0:23:14.720 forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go 0:23:14.760 --> 0:23:19.680 to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. 0:23:20.440 --> 0:23:25.320 That is all one word news podcasts sold And if 0:23:25.359 --> 0:23:29.760 you want further information about this episode, links are in 0:23:30.080 --> 0:23:30.720 the description.