From the Inside: Chopper 1 (9 page)

Chapter 9

The overcoat war

‘I am confident that I hold the bashing record inside Pentridge . . . and it will never be beaten’.

THE Overcoat Gang War, which went five years inside Pentridge, was probably the bloodiest crime war in Victoria. But because it was waged inside jail very little was ever heard about it on the outside.

Like most wars, it started over something fairly small . . . in this case, when Piggy Palmer accused me of eating the Christmas sausages in H Division. The word was out in 1975 that we would get a feed — I think two each — of thick pork sausages. Everyone was looking forward to them, and I was in charge of bringing the food up.

When it got there . . . no sausages.

Palmer said I had eaten the lot. Well, there would have been 60 sausages and I was supposed to have eaten all of them. I love a snag but that’s ridiculous. But, ridiculous or not, harsh words were spoken and blood enemies were made. Keithy Faure sided with Palmer and the war began.

Keith George Faure represented the power in Pentridge in the 1970s. Every Painter and Docker in the jail backed Keithy. He represented the criminal version of the old school tie. Johnny Palmer was also from an old Dockie family so they stuck together. We used to call Keith ‘The Frenchman’ and we called his crew of underlings and hangers-on the ‘KGB’, short for Keith George’s Boys.

The Overcoat Gang should never have won the war but we did because I never fight anyone at their game, on their playing field, with their rules.

Keith lost the war with me because he spent too much time trying to be a politician. Once the blood starts flying, politics and talk won’t solve anything. But while old Keithy didn’t know much about tactics, he did have guts, that’s for sure.

Besides the Great Christmas Sausage Scandal, there was another underlying reason for the war. Faure ran the Dockies in jail and I was close to Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley. He wanted Longley’s head on a plate and he would have been happy to do a life sentence to get at ‘The Texan’.

During Longley’s sentence it was made clear to one and all that you don’t kill ‘The Texan’ unless you kill ‘Chopper’ first, because my revenge would have been tenfold and I would have drowned the offenders in their own blood. It saddens me that Old Billy did not appreciate that the Overcoat Gang kept him alive when he was in jail. Does he really think he stayed alive in there because of his own physical abilities?

During the five year war the Overcoat Gang was outnumbered, but I had a blood crazy crew who threw themselves into their work with admirable zeal.

Some members came and went but the main players were my good self, Jimmy Loughnan, now dead, Johnny Price, who committed suicide, Danny James, who has been declared criminally insane, Ted Eastwood, still in jail, Bluey B, in jail, Paul Hetzel, expelled for cowardice in the face of the enemy (and later became a crown witness in the Russell Street bombing case) and Amos ‘The Witchdoctor’ Atkinson, who is alive and free.

The bash list during the war was astounding. For some time we kept count. My personal list was 63 attacks and 11 attempted murders.

Amos got about 30, Jimmy Loughnan iron barred his fair share — God knows, I would say about 20. The list was very long. Johnny Price had his own list. Then Jim teamed up with Robbie Wright and they scored a few more.

I would say the Overcoat War saw well over 100 separate attacks over the five years before some of us went to Jika and couldn’t get at each other as often.

I am confident that I hold the bashing record inside Pentridge and it will never be beaten, because the jail is now structured differently.

The war ended in 1980 because they sent some of us to Jika Jika when it first opened. There were a few half-hearted attempts to keep it going but we just couldn’t get at each other anymore.

Prisoner violence was considered the past-time of the 1970s. Back then some of the screws and the governors encouraged it. They thought it was akin to a bloody good football match. It kept the prison population busy and gave them something to think about.

The jail governors today are a little limp-wristed when it comes to matters of violence. Since the 1980s the jail has been ruled by drugs and violence, but the class of men and the class of violence is very petty. Savage and evil, yes, but very petty.

In the 1970s the jail was ruled by home brew and iron bars. The violence raged from one end of the place to the other. The Press got told very little about it. The younger crims today simply find it hard to believe the stories of blood and guts that went on inside and outside jail.

These days the so called top crims are so full of junk they couldn’t change their underwear. Outside it is the same. The gang bosses and the drug lords get rid of their enemies by ringing the police. They demand police protection if their own lives are threatened. The guts and courage have gone. The criminal scene is just a sea of vomit. But back in the days of the Overcoat War there was plenty of full-on guts and courage on both sides.

Our side was outnumbered but we had some great tactical advantages. We had a spy network right through the prison and we had the moral support and the blind eye encouragement of a handful of the most Right Wing, broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared, hired by the pound, knuckles scraping on the ground, leg-breaking screws any jail had ever seen. We also had one big bonus, the blessing of Jimmy Quinn, the Pentridge Governor of Security.

When the blood starts flying, I’ll do business with the Devil himself. Victory at all costs is the only thing. You can discuss the moral ethics as we bury the enemy. That’s how I got away with it all for five years: I had a friend in high places.

Governor Quinn died in the early 1980s. He was a grand old fellow, a man who would have a drink on any occasion. He loved a bet, a fight, and blood and guts — and he thought the world of me and I of him. In the 1970s Jimmy Quinn once had his nose broken in a punch-on with Keithy Faure in B Division. So when the Overcoat War broke out, Jimmy Quinn took my side. Faure already had a few high-ranking prison staff on side, but I had all the old time blood and guts brigade. After all, it was a prison war between inmates, but we were fighting on the screws’ playing field, so some friends at court were needed on both sides. I think Keithy Faure went through the whole war wishing he hadn’t broken the governor’s nose.

Through Governor Quinn I could get into other prisoners’ cells at night, get into other yards, and get prisoners transferred from one division to another, have my own men moved. The pull I had was quite unbelievable. Quinn used to send two security screws down to H Division early in the morning, handcuff me and bring me up to the security office and into his office. I’d be uncuffed there and the governor would sit down with me, his office door closed, and we’d drink coffee and eat Choc Royal bickies and watch slides of his latest overseas holidays. Now and again he would break out a small bottle of whisky or a can or two of beer. At the height of the Overcoat War he once had me brought to his office and over a can of beer he explained to me that for every dozen or so bashings and attacks the Overcoat Gang did, only one would get a mention on any report, and none, if any, on my personal records. It was getting a bit tropical and I had to ease it up for a while. The A Division bomb had just gone off and Quinn was under pressure. He then said that out of every twelve or so bashings one would get a mention.

When I cut my ears off Governor Quinn came to hospital to visit me. When I got stabbed he also came in to see me. He was good mates with my Dad. He was not a corrupt man. He was just an old-style blood and guts boy, and a good war in jail gave us all something to do. He was a grand old fellow, and his death was a great sadness to me personally.

The toughest screw in Pentridge throughout the 60s and 70s was old George. He was an H Division screw and as hard as nails, but a goodhearted fellow. A former European boxing title holder, a prisoner of the Germans for three years and a defector from the Russian Navy, George was not a man to be taken lightly. He was another old-style blood and guts boy and considered a good jail war was just what the boys needed to keep busy. He was a great old chap and no longer in the prison service. They were a breed of tough prison officers with a sense of humour — men who got respect, but who were not corrupt.

One of Jimmy Loughnan’s favourite party tricks in H Division during the war was to get hold of chaps we felt had been ‘putting holes in their manners’. We would grab the offending party and give him a touch up — otherwise known as a sound beating. Then we would stand him up. I’d put a butcher’s knife to his neck and Jimmy would pop a razor blade in his mouth and he would be told to chew on it.

There would be a little protest at first, but it was a case of chew or die — and a mouth full of blood was better than a neck full of cold steel. So chew, it would be. If you’ve never seen a man chew a razor blade you have never seen blood flow. There would be choking and coughing and blood — sometimes vomiting. It was a lesson once learnt, never forgotten. It must have been pain beyond description. But H Division in the 1970s was a blood-soaked mental hospital of violence and more violence — and only the truly ultra-violent could rule it.

Loughnan had a true blood lust. As a 14-year-old boy he was placed in J Ward at Ararat — a mental hospital for the criminally insane. J Ward is still a dark legend today in the minds of the men who have been in it.

Now, I certainly can’t admit to this, so I will have to dismiss it as foul gossip and slander. I’m referring to the bomb that went off in a cell in A Division in the late 1970s. I’ve done that much jail I can’t remember even the date and the year. Johnny Palmer and Neil Bugg and some other chap got caught in it. A young chap called Trevor Taylor came down to H Division from A Division over suspicion of planting the bomb. It didn’t kill anyone, but nearly did. It was suggested that Jimmy Loughnan told Trevor to plant the bomb on my orders. I believe it was a ‘fertiliser bomb’. Of course, I deny all. It was rumoured to be another strike in the Overcoat War. I met poor Neil a few years later; I had nothing against him, but he was a casualty of war.

The list of weapons made and used in Pentridge goes on and on, and we used them all. There are iron bars, claw hammers, garden spades, home-made tomahawks, ice picks, screwdrivers sharpened to a pinpoint, nun-chukkas, meat cleavers and butcher’s knives from the kitchen.

My favourite was a razor blade welded into the end of a toothbrush with a cigarette lighter, or a blade with sticky-tape wrapped around one end. When it is held between the thumb and the forefinger with a flash of the wrist you can open a man’s face up like a ripe watermelon.

Pepper tossed in the eyes can blind an enemy for a short time. The toilet or shower attack is a favourite in jail: taking an enemy as he sits on the toilet or is under the shower. Dennis Allen got his while he was under the shower. The ordinary ballpoint pen jabbed into the eye ball, a tin of condensed milk put in two thick socks makes a lethal cosh, broken glass put into the victim’s food, razor blades in his bed, caustic soda in a cordial bottle, razor blades buried in a bar of soap. The fun and games in here never end; tactics are only limited by your imagination.

Once, during the war, it was decided someone had to go up to B Division from H Division and bash a couple of blokes. Jimmy Loughnan had to remain on H Division on punishments. I wasn’t allowed out of H Division as I was a maximum security prisoner, so it was between Johnny Price and Amos Atkinson.

Amos and Price drew straws — matchsticks, in fact. Amos got the short stick. He went up to B Division after asking for a transfer out of H Division. He walked into B Division — didn’t even put his things in his cell — and got a big hammer and bashed Lance Chee and Graeme Jensen over the head, then came back down to H Division.

That was all very well. The trouble was, I’d sent him up to B Division to bash two other chaps. I was a little bit put out. I said to Amos: ‘What have Chee and Jensen got to do with anything?’.

I don’t believe this, but this was his answer: ‘All white guys look a bit alike’. Rubbish. He was just being lazy, that’s all. That was 1979. He was charged internally over it at Governor’s Court. I never sent him on any other seek and destroy missions. All white guys look alike! What a lot of codswallop. Seven years later Jensen and his stupid crew tried to attack me over that, and came unstuck.

One trick we used that I can now admit was the soap scam. A dirty trick but it was a jail gang war, so all was fair . . .

I got a dozen bars of soap, soaked them in a plastic bucket of hot water for 15 minutes, then pulled them out and slid a razor blade down the side of each bar. Then I left them out in the sun to harden.

I was H Division number one billet at the time. My job was serving out the meals, cleaning the cells, the wing, the labour yard and the shower yards — meaning I had total run of the division. I removed all soap from the shower yards, and put six blocks of my special trick soap in each shower yard.

Needless to say, without going into the bloody details, it worked a treat. My enemies were not only frightened to eat their food — for fear of rat poison or human shit in the stew — they couldn’t even use soap in the showers without fear. I was mentally destroying their will. I would leave dobs of jam under their beds to attract ants. I’d piss in their cordial bottles, shit in their jam and cover it with jam. Along with the bloody violence and the physical beatings these added touches reduced Faure’s gang to tears — and total surrender.

When I was in B Division in 1975 they let us put on concerts and shows in B Division and A Division. The B Division boys went down to the A Division concert. Me and Jimmy Loughnan were both wearing overcoats: me with a tomahawk and Jimmy with a knife and an iron bar.

We got to see the best concert ever — Johnny O’Keefe. He sang all his songs. He came dressed as if he was playing a big show and not a jail concert. He was a real professional and it was a privilege and a pleasure just to sit and watch him. Me and Jim sat up front with a couple of our boys watching our backs.