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

head worth about $6000 a pound. I never had the wealth of my enemies, but that was my personal choice. If I wanted to go in that direction I would have made Mr Asia look like a street dealer.
    But to be a drug dealer? Where is the honor? Where is the pride? Where is the personal respect? Even a man with no friends and family has to look himself in the mirror. At least I can do that.
    I climbed up the blood and guts ladder of the criminal world, by the force of my own hand, not the coward’s way up, using white powder and black money.
    I’d hate anyone to think that my problem with drug dealers has ever been jealousy or envy. It’s just that I despise them. They have no right to wealth or power.
    *
    SIX-TOES Ray Read, no relation, was not a criminal. But maybe he should have been. He choked to death on his own vomit after a drunken binge and no-one called an ambulance or a doctor as he lay gagging at a party in Albert Park.
    Ray Read was the evil genius of the practical joke. He would tell people he was my brother and that I was adopted from a children’s home for the mentally retarded. He told a girlfriend of mine that I had been operated on so that I could not father children because insanity ran in my family.
    He put small fish hooks in chunks of meat and then fed them to friend’s dogs. He would inject caustic soda into cartons of milk in his friends’ fridges. He would pour caustic soda into the fish tanks at people’s homes. He would have people’s cars towed away, would call them ambulances when they weren’t sick and would call the cops with tip-offs that his mates were dealing in drugs or harboring escaped convicts.
    He was the master of spreading false rumors and stories that wives and girlfriends of mates had VD. He would light small fires when invited to weddings; he pinched a bloke’s widow on the bum at the funeral. He would drop shotgun shells in fires at barbecues just before he left the party. His list of tricks were endless.
    He once took an old, 79-year-old senile woman shopping in Richmond and then dumped her. She was lost for 24 hours, wandering the streets. Oh yes, he was a laugh a minute, all right.
    When Ray got married he stuck 50-cent pieces to mousetraps so they would sink and placed them in a soapy bubble bath for his new bride. The marriage lasted five weeks.
    Now, I felt this was just too much. Ray had a hot tub in his backyard. It was full and he used it daily. Dave the Jew and I had a plan to electrify it to kill Ray.
    In the end we just placed three very strong rabbit traps in the bottom. Ray spent three weeks in hospital. He lost four toes — hence the name ‘Six Toes.’
    I must say that I liked the bastard. He was funny, but he went too far.
    *
    THE best laid plans of mice and men go wrong in the underworld as often as in any other field of endeavor. Nothing can be planned 100 per cent before hand and that relates ten fold when it comes to the clinical science of murder.
    I remember that in 1977 I made four separate attempts on the life of one particular fellow. He trusted me and I was one of the few fellows he would let through the front door.
    The first time I went around I was about to pull out my sawn- off 12 gauge shotgun and blow his brains out while his back was turned. Just at the wrong moment, the bloody door bell rang. He answered it and there was a young girl collecting for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal. She got a good long look at my face while he went to get some money, so I put it down to experience and went home.
    My second attempt found his mother at home with him enjoying tea and cakes. I’ve never been one to break up a happy family, so again I held my fire.
    My third attempt was foiled when there was a knock on the door about a minute after I arrived. It was a lady friend of his. The fourth time he just let me in and the phone rang. He answered it and said; ‘Hello. Oh nothing. Chopper’s just called round.’ Little did he know that these words saved his life;