Mark "Chopper" Read and Alphonse Gangitano were two of the most violent men in Melbourne's underworld, and for years they were at war with each other. This film sets out how that feud began, the night the two men were together in a nightclub when a world champion boxer was beaten almost beyond recognition, and why Read, whatever people say of him, belongs among Australia's deadliest prisoners.
Lazar's
The film opens with the boxer himself, Barry Michael. He was in Lazar's nightclub when his wife started screaming. His friend was being carried out unconscious by the bouncers, and when he turned round he was surrounded by men with, as he puts it, death in their eyes. He knew they carried pistols. He accused Gangitano of setting him up, and Gangitano jumped him. He was pulled down on to a couch and beaten; his nose was smashed across his face, and he believes Gangitano latched on to his cheek and tried to bite it off. Read says they hit him with a glass ashtray. In the end a bouncer sat on him and told the others he had had enough, that they would kill him.
Read claims he was there. Michael does not remember seeing him. Read later said Michael's boxing career was finished that night. The film says the attack was linked to Gangitano looking after the interests of a rival boxer, and that the two camps had already clashed in a car park brawl.
Vigilante or fantasist
Read, the film says, often merged fact with fantasy. Many men call him a fantasist, but few would have said it to his face. He justified his violence as a kind of vigilantism: he claimed he never tortured or murdered an innocent person, and preyed only on drug dealers, above all heroin dealers, who drove past in Mercedes coupes wearing expensive Rolex watches.
One man Read accused of orchestrating heroin shipments in the 1980s was Gangitano, the Black Prince of Lygon Street, part of the Carlton Crew. The film puts it at 25 to 30 per cent of all the heroin that went through Melbourne between 1980 and 1997.
The toilet door
The feud went back to the late 1970s. Read was a few years older and had once given Gangitano his first shotgun. In 1976, Read says, he got out of jail, met Gangitano in a hotel, and said that when he saw Shane Goodfellow he was going to belt him. He did not know Goodfellow, a legendary street fighter, was a friend of Gangitano's. Soon afterwards, Read says, he was in the toilet when the door was smashed open and Gangitano and his boys kicked him in the face. He came out swinging at bouncers. Gangitano had gone.
Read waited. Revenge, he said, is a dish best eaten cold, and he would eat it freezing. He got hold of gelignite and handguns and started shooting up places Gangitano was involved with. At one gambling club, he says, Gangitano escaped through the toilet window, landed on the roof of a car and hurt his back, then went to Mick Gatto saying Read wanted to blow his head off. He took his family away on holiday to escape. Once Read was back inside, Gangitano returned to causing mayhem.
By 1986, when Read left prison, the two seem to have been on good terms, which is why his presence at Lazar's raises questions. Gangitano was eventually shot dead, not on Read's orders but by people much closer to home. The case is unsolved; the film says it is widely suspected that Jason or Mark Moran pulled the trigger, with Graham Kinniburgh present.
Gangitano inside
Violence ran through Gangitano's life, from private school onwards. His hatred of the police is traced to a fight at Bunnies in Footscray, where bouncers were smashed and a car was driven through the front of the club, after which he was allegedly beaten by police. Jailed after a sports bar attack in which 13 people were badly hurt, he bit through another prisoner's nose in an argument over gambling, according to a former prison associate who contacted the channel. But inside, the film says, he was not in Read's league.
H Division
In August 1976 Read became the billet in Pentridge's H Division, in cell one beside the guard station, free of searches and able to move around. He later claimed he used the job to put faeces in the prison stew, masked with mustard and curry powder. He lost the post in December 1976.
At Christmas, the prisoners' two pork sausages each did not arrive. John "Piggy" Palmer blamed Read, and Read knocked him out in the yard the next day. The film suggests the sausages may never have existed. The accusation started a war between Read and a faction of Painters and Dockers who ran the prison rackets and saw him as an informer. A former prisoner calls him a rat, and says the guards gave him a wooden mallet. The film says guards, restrained by media scrutiny and the Victorian Ombudsman, may have used Read as a weapon against their enemies.
H Division became ungovernable. Read was moved out for his own safety in March 1977, and in August 1977 he was paroled straight from it. Feared, hated and perhaps used by the system, he left Pentridge with the reputation that made him.