Chopper Unchopped by Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read Page B

land, have proved through history to conduct themselves in a blood crazy manner. No army likes to think of a punishment battalion on the other side against them.
    Killers, rapists, thieves and armed robbers — trained, armed and placed in the frontline of combat — would prove a blood crazy force of butchers. When cowards have no place to run, they will drink the blood of 1000 heroes to survive. Those words were used to describe the Foreign Legion 100 years ago. A punishment battalion is a sound idea, like it or not. It would give a hard edge to the Australian Army and solve a social problem.
    A life sentence could be changed to ten years in the punishment battalion.
    It’s obvious that when war comes it will come as a shock to this disbelieving nation, and we will be caught totally off-guard.
    If we become an independent republic we had better be able to defend ourselves. As it is now we had better give all the girl guides a pocket knife each, for if we don’t do something, that is all we’ll end up with.
    I may be a crook, but I’m a patriotic crook.

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