Free Hits and Memories: Chopper 2 by Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read

wasn’t the fall that killed him, it was the sudden stop at the bottom.
    Now, some unkind people have had the bad manners to suggest that the Penguin put a sawn-off shotgun to the rock spider’s head and gave him the choice of either taking a dive, or having his brains blown out.
    The rock spider elected to take the dive.
    The Penguin naturally dismisses such statements as foul gossip and rumor.
    *
    YES, I am a violent crook and yes, some of my critics at literary lunches have accused me of being a psychopath, but while I am at home with a blowtorch or a sawn-off shotgun, even I have my limits.
    I must tell you of a little Maltese chap who rorted the system something fierce. While I was working up an honest sweat torturing drug dealers to make a living, this bloke would sit back getting regular cheques from the government for next to nothing.
    Now I was responsible for getting this guy the easy life but what was in it for old Chopper? Not even a thankyou card or a Christmas present.
    The man involved was a chap I will call Maltese Joe. He worked in the sheet metal industry but when he didn’t work he was involved in gambling at various card games around Richmond and Prahran.
    While he loved to play cards, this bloke obviously wasn’t the full deck himself as on one occasion he attacked me in a hotel in South Yarra with a broken bottle. This was neither healthy nor polite. Luckily I managed to ward off this nutty little Malteser with a pool cue.
    He ran off from the hotel threatening me with death, telling everyone he was off home to get a gun.
    Maltese Joe’s girlfriend worked at another South Yarra pub and in jest I had said to this woman. ‘Darling, you would have to be the ugliest barmaid I’ve ever seen.’
    I was a bit pissed, and I shouldn’t have said it but, dear me, she was a total pig dog. But with certain people of ethnic persuasion, truth is not a defence and the Maltese bloke vowed that no matter how long it would take, he would get me.
    Well, I walked into a pub in Windsor and he was standing at the bar, one hand on a beer and the other resting on the bar. He looked quite surprised when I pulled out my trusty meat cleaver and slammed it down on the bar, removing his four fingers at the knuckle. I then walked out.
    Eighteen months later I found that Maltese Joe collected a large, five figure workers’ compensation payout and a pension for life for losing his fingers, apparently due to an accident at work on night shift at the factory.
    How he worked that one out I’ll never know. I suppose he had the last laugh, and not even a drink in it for old Chop Chop. Even though he was less than generous in sharing his good fortune with me, it would still be wrong for me to put the finger on him. In polite society, it’s simply not done.
    *
    IN my first book I explained that I have been in love for years with the most wonderful woman in Australia, the publishing mogul and thinking man’s thex thymbol, Ita Buttrose.
    As the world now knows I had the words. ‘I LOVE ITA BUTTROSE’ tattooed on my bum. I had this done as my own personal tribute to a wonderful woman.
    It is now criminal folklore that a group of us in H Division in the early 1970s formed the Ita Buttrose fan club, because in those days, the only magazines we were allowed in the lop security area were the Readers Digest and Women’s Weekly .
    I have told the story of how a drunken fool, now known as ‘One eyed Pauly’, bad-mouthed Ita in an inner-city pub while I was standing next to him. Needless to say, I could not just stand there and allow the sainted Ita to be defamed in such a foul way without me leaping to her defence.
    It was a short but vicious fight which I managed to win. In the book I described how when he was out cold I made sure he lost an eye. But there was more to that fight than you, dear readers, were told. Imagine my surprise when I read the published version of the book to see that I had been cruelly, and in my view