From the Inside: Chopper 1 by Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read Read Free Book Online

comparison.
    Speaking of which, Dave the Jew rang me one day in 1977 and asked could I come to an address in Port Melbourne. I took a taxi from Rockley Road, South Yarra, armed to the teeth and carrying a small bag containing a hand-held gas bottle and blow torch.
    The game was afoot, if you get my meaning. Dave the Jew was the best headhunter and catcher I’d ever known. He’d been drinking with a crew of Irish seamen on the advice of Vincent Villeroy, the old Irish boxer, soldier and standover man we knew. One of these seamen — we’ll call him Sweeney — was working on a bodgie ticket and papers. He was bringing smack into Melbourne. Neither Dave nor I had the slightest interest in smack, but on Vincent’s advice we watched and waited, ready to pounce, until cash changed hands.
    Dave had lain under a house in Port Melbourne with a sleeping bag, pillow, and cans of lemonade and baked beans from Friday until Saturday night. It was about 2am on the Sunday morning when, at last, Sweeney staggered up the driveway to visit his old mother, drunk as a lord.
    ‘Bloody mothers’, said Dave. ‘They will be the death of us all’. Ha ha. Dave often made mother jokes. Poor old Sweeney didn’t even get to wake Mum up. Dave had got him.
    An iron bar over a drunk’s head is pretty useless, but across the back of the back of the neck not too hard, it puts a drunk to sleep. You have to know what you’re doing, or you can shatter the central nervous system. But the Jew was an old hand at this technique. In no time Sweeney was asleep in the boot of the car.
    We drove a short distance to a hotel where Vincent Villeroy said we could use the cellar without making any noise.
    There I was, Dr Chopper with his medical bag, doing a night call at this pub in Port Melbourne. Vincent let me in, and stayed in the back bar drinking with the publican, pretending to have no idea whatsoever that ‘torture most foul’ was to take place in the keg cellar.
    I went down and shut the trap behind me. There was Dave the Jew trying to revive a sleeping Sweeney, to no avail. ‘Take his shoes and socks off’, said I. ‘This will liven him up’. I pulled the gas bottle out, turned it on and lit her up, adjusting the flame to a good yellow, not a fine blue. I wanted to produce pain, not cut his feet off. I put the flame to the sole of the bare foot. Dave held it up for me. Within a matter of 20 seconds the sole was bubbling, snap-crackle-pop, a burning mess. Flesh burns because of the fat content.
    The smell was shocking. The fumes had reached the nostrils of Vincent and the publican. The trap door went up. It was the bloody publican’s wife. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she screamed. We dropped the foot and ran up the stairs. It was havoc.
    The publican was out cold. Vincent had knocked him out. The publican’s wife was screaming. Her three kiddies in their night clothes were standing in the stairway asking what the matter was. Twenty years jail flashed through my mind. Dave had his gun out and wanted to kill every living human being in the pub. This was toe-cutter comedy at its most insane. To top it off we could still smell the fumes of Sweeney’s bloody foot. It was alight, smoking and smelling terrible.
    ‘Aaah!’ screamed the publican’s wife. She grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran down the cellar stairs and put the foot out. Dave turned to old Vincent, yelling ‘You stupid punchy Irish bastard! I thought you said the bloody pub was empty!’
    ‘No problem’ said Vincent. ‘They won’t tell.’
    ‘Won’t tell’ yelled Dave. ‘I’m killing them anyway!’
    This was a tricky one. We had seen Dave the Jew like this before, his blue eyes ablaze, gun in hand. Too much ‘Mien Kampf’, if you ask me.
    It was obvious the general had to take control before Dave shot the household, including myself and Vincent.
    ‘Okay’, I said to Dave. ‘They are off’.
    Dave relaxed. ‘Vinnie’, I said to Vincent, ‘give Dave a hand’. I winked as I said