Mayhem Read online

  He takes a handful of crap and finger-paints these bare facts.

  This man, this fool, me, you, what-the-fuck, was born 7 October 1968 in Fremantle. He died today. Died here. Fucking waste of air.

  But one more thing – the important part: lower down the tombstone he smears messages to whatever coroner is assigned to today’s dead inmate. Listen, he spells out. Get the recordings of me ringing Mum. I tell her; I told her; she knows how it is here. So listen, listen to me tell her how isolation is worse than death and everybody knows and the cunts have done it again and again to me, keeping me in this bullshit for fucking years, man, winding me up, driving me nuts, and I can’t take it anymore. It’s wrong. It’s over. I’m over. I’m dead. See ya.

  *

  Sitting ready in the stinking cell. All exits removed, even little points that might carry weight – dying weight, dead weight. No hanging points. Can’t get to hell even when you’re in it.

  They switched his clothes when sticking him in here and Chris can’t get the fucking suicide smock off.

  Unrippable canvas made to keep us bastards alive when we need to die.

  Canvas across the throat: muscle up and clench. Here it comes, here I go, love ya Charlize, love ya more than anything my baby girl, I’ll watch over you from the other side, I promise. Yes: comes the blacknessssssssssssssss.

  *

  What the fuck? Awake again. Still here. Canvas across the throat, muscle up and clench. See yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

  *

  Awake. What the fuck. Why can’t he, I, who, you, keep that cloth tight right through to death? Who wound us so loose in our fucked up misery that we can’t even die? Who the fuck is god? Where’s your mercy? Cunt of a curse. Curse of the cunts.

  *

  ‘Chris!’

  *

  It’s an ‘observation cell’ and when the officers observe Chris in this abject state, slumped and fouled and unable, they call the medics.

  *

  Take medication is their advice. Get on prison’s mass prescription program. Won’t bother you so much then, getting held for years on years in solitary, held in your head, held in all the clipboard flow-chart euphemisms like ‘management placement’ or ‘isolation’. What the fuck, ya know.

  For four years now the only people ever standing in the same room as him anywhere in jail are the screws. His captors.

  If he’s escorted to the phone to make a call then that area is first cleared of prisoners. If he’s allowed to use exercise equipment that area is emptied before he gets there.

  That’s no society at all. He’s removed. He’s gone. He’s erased. He’s out of his fucking mind. He’s in the space zone.

  Chris has done many years prior, for his priors, of this sort of solo space-travel stretch, but never for so long. The judge – whose name was Forrest; last forest he’ll ever see – said he’d probably do another fucking decade and a half of this time. What time. No time. All time. No one else here but the screws. Shout into the fucking void.

  *

  ‘Take the medication, Chris. It’ll make things easier.’

  ‘Fuck that. I’m not taking that shit.’

  *

  So they keep their zombie pills and remove Chris’ unrippable smock, leaving him stark fucking naked in this smooth box.

  Now there’s guards at his door and a camera installed up top of the cell, staring down forever, whatever, wherever he is in this microscope slide, whether sitting or shitting or wanking or lying on the floor pounding his face and crying.

  *

  That’ll fix him.

  Because this is a correctional facility. This is Corrections Victoria and they’ve got plenty of experience correcting Chris. They’ve been doing it since he was thirteen.

  4. LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK

  CIRCA 1972:

  IN THE SUPERMARKET

  Sitting up late, the house gradually cooling after another baking Melbourne day, Annette passes me a photograph of a cute-looking little brown-eyed munchkin of the 1970s, Chris smiling away under his bowl haircut.

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘Trouble?’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Chris was always mischievous, always a daredevil, always playing pranks.’ Annette talks about his endless wild feats of climbing and jumping, of go-go-going on bikes and whatever else was at hand to ride or play faster and harder and longer than anyone else; his athletic skills, his irrepressible humour, his pranking her with dead snakes and his Mother’s Day present of a dead mouse.

  Annette’s second son, Barry, was and is very different, she says – thoughtful, considerate, more cautious – and as a result often found it hard living in the wake of his headstrong older brother.

  Yet, sometimes he got dragged in. ‘There’s a photo of them somewhere here,’ she says, leafing through the albums. ‘They’re holding a bag of herbs, making out it’s marijuana and I was shocked. I hit the roof and had a go at Chris about that photo, and he told me it was just parsley or something and they were trying to make it look like marijuana. They had me going, the little horrors.’

  Funnily enough, Chris has mentioned this very incident to me.

  ‘It was marijuana,’ I say.

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ Annette says. ‘It was parsley or something that they made out to look like marijuana for the photo. “Mum,” Chris said to me. “It was only herbs; we were only stooging you.”’

  ‘That’s what they told everybody,’ I say. ‘Chris said he thought it would be daring to pose with mari –’

  ‘He was just trying to stir me up.’

  *

  I ask if she can track Chris’ wildness back to any particular time.

  She thinks for a while. ‘Chris was an early developer: couldn’t keep him in a bassinet – any chance he got he’d be out and into everything. He walked at nine months. There was never any containing Chris.’

  ‘What about crime, though? When’s the first time you remember him doing something like stealing?’

  Her laugh turns into a cough which she bites back.

  ‘When Chris was about four and Barry was still in a pram, I was in the supermarket with them. I turn around and here’s Chris, aged four, stuffing a Little Golden Book under his shirt. I smacked him. You wouldn’t think a 4-year-old would think like that, would you?’

  5. YOUNG CHRIS’ REPORT CARDS

  1982–86:

  IN THE DOCK

  Ever the cheeky young fella, Chris knew how first to keep his mum and then the cops and courts and juvenile detention centres pretty darned busy.

  His first stay in the clink was at age thirteen, when he was locked up in the secure Warrawong punishment block of Baltara, the feeder institution for Turana Youth Training Centre which he moved into at fourteen, the age he was declared a ward of the state, a place which, in turn, did what it could to prepare him for adult prisons.

  Chris’ repeated self checkouts, including wall-leaping shenanigans from Poplar House, Turana’s maximum-security section, appear to have accelerated him through the correctional system, for at seventeen he graduated early from juvie, getting shifted from the lads’ home at Parkville in central Melbourne to the maximum-security HM Prison Pentridge.

  This notoriously brutal funhouse was also known as the ‘College of Knowledge’.

  Chris will soon tell us himself about the good times he had as a wet-behind-the-ears teeny tossed into Pentridge. First, though, let’s have a squizz at his report cards. Given that school and him didn’t really take to each other – one expulsion coming after he accepted a dare to flash his willy at a relief teacher – these are Chris’ real adolescent report cards.

  Aged 13 years

  In the dock, 11 May 1982:

  –Burglary (4 counts)

  –Theft (3 counts)

  In the dock, 28 July 1982:

  –Burglary (4 counts)

  –Theft (5 counts)

  –Tamper with motor car

  –Handle stolen goods

  –Going equippe
d to steal

  In the dock, 3 August 1982:

  –Burglary

  –Theft

  –Going equipped to steal

  In the dock, 31 August 1982:

  –Theft of motor cycle

  In the dock again, 31 August

  1982:

  –Theft of bicycle

  –Unlawful possession

  In the dock, 27 September 1982:

  –Theft from motor car

  Aged 14 years

  In the dock, 27 April 1983:

  –Theft of motor car (2 counts)

  –Unlicensed driver

  –Failure to wear seat belt

  In the dock, 14 June 1983:

  –Theft of motor car (3 counts)

  –Going equipped to steal (3 counts)

  –Theft from motor car

  –Unlicensed driver (3 counts)

  In the dock, 12 July 1983:

  –Theft from motor car

  In the dock, 26 July 1983:

  –Unlicensed rider

  –Unregistered motor cycle

  –Uninsured motor cycle

  In the dock, 2 August 1983:

  –Theft

  Aged 15 years

  In the dock, 2 January 1984:

  –Burglary

  In the dock, 24 January 1984:

  –Unregistered motor cycle

  –Unlicensed rider

  –No helmet

  –Carry pillion passenger

  –State false name and address

  In the dock, 2 April 1984:

  –Theft of motor car (2 counts)

  –Theft from motor car (6 counts)

  –Interfere with motor car

  –Smoke drug of dependence

  –Possess drug of dependence

  –Theft

  –Unlicensed driving (2 counts)

  In the dock again, 2 April 1984:

  –Armed robbery

  –Robbery

  –Assault occasioning actual bodily harm (2 counts)

  –Unlawful assault (2 counts)

  –Assault with intent to rob

  –Unlawfully on premises

  –Attempted armed robbery

  –Theft

  –Theft of bicycle

  –Escape YTC [Youth Training

  Centre]

  In the dock, 1 May 1984:

  –Attempted theft

  –Going equipped to steal

  –Unlicensed driving

  –Theft from motor car (4 counts)

  –Burglary

  In the dock, 19 June 1984:

  –Burglary

  –Theft of motor car

  –Unlicensed driving

  In the dock, 12 September 1984:

  –Escape (2 counts)

  –Shorten barrel of a firearm

  –Burglary

  –Theft

  –Theft of motor car

  –Possess pistol

  –Unlicensed driving

  Aged 16 years

  In the dock, 29 October 1984:

  –Escape

  In the dock, 23 November 1984:

  –Appealed against convictions and

  sentences of 12 September 1984

  (appeals dismissed, convictions and

  sentences affirmed)

  In the dock, 17 May 1985:

  –Escape

  Aged 17 years

  In the dock, 18 November 1985:

  –Theft from motor car

  In the dock, 12 December 1985:

  –Theft of motor car

  In the dock, 21 April 1986:

  –Unlawfully on premises

  –Going equipped to steal

  –Receive stolen goods

  In the dock, 14 August 1986:

  –Burglary

  –Theft (2 counts)

  –Theft of motor car

  –Driving while disqualified

  In the dock, 19 August 1986:

  –Burglary

  –Theft

  –Wilful damage

  –Escape

  Top marks for consistent effort. The standout, however, has got to be April 1983: not only does Chris get done for boosting a car but the safety conscious police officers also sting him for not wearing a seat belt.

  Guess it taught him to buckle up because even though he keeps stealing cars right through his adolescence, that charge doesn’t reappear.

  A bit of caution as a young thief about town in 1980s Melbourne is not a bad thing. These are dangerous days. People are getting maimed and killed.

  PRISON SLANG: LESSON ONE

  Putrid – the lowest insult to another inmate

  Dog – informant; if you call someone this there will be violence

  Bone yard – the protection yard where inmates who have drama in the main yards are kept separate, where the dogs are, hence the name

  7. CRIME AS GUERRILLA WAR

  LATE 1980S:

  MELBOURNE

  In March of 1986, Chris’ last year as a minor and apprentice bandit, the ever-tense contest between Melbourne’s cops and robbers takes a warlike turn when an armed hold-up crew carbombs the Russell Street police station.

  Constable Angela Taylor dies from the wounds she sustains, while about 21 other people are also injured. The most severely hurt of the survivors are Magistrate Iain West and Constable Carl Donadio.

  Over the following two years alone, 1987 and 1988, the Victorian police shoot dead eleven criminals, some in highly questionable circumstances, with many slain by what become Chris’ dual foes: the Armed Robbery Squad and the Special Operations Group, or SOG.

  To put the killing of eleven people in two years into context, it took the police the previous thirteen years just to kill ten.

  If the car-bombing strips away any pretence of old-school respectability from Victoria’s cops and robbers circuit, then what happens in October 1988 well and truly spins the game. To its combatants it feels like low intensity guerrilla war.

  On the eleventh of October 1988 – just a few days after Chris’ twentieth birthday – police shoot dead bank robber Graeme Jensen in what even some former officers later say is an extrajudicial killing. The next morning, a couple hours before dawn, two constables, Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, respond to reports of a Holden Commodore abandoned across Walsh Street in Melbourne’s prestigious suburb of South Yarra.

  It’s an ambush: they are shot and killed at the scene, Tynan blasted with a shotgun as he sits in the patrol car, while Eyre – who had walked up to the Commodore – is hit but struggles until finished off with his own revolver.

  Weirdly, Tynan’s blooding in the dicey cops-and-robbers game had come just ten days earlier and only five blocks away. Called to South Yarra’s Myrtle Street TAB on the first of October, Tynan finds the manager bailed up and used as a shield by two young men, one armed with a knife and the other a pistol (which turns out to be a replica).

  When the TAB manager, Audrey Kirkwood, hits the floor, Tynan shoots Hai Foong Yap, 19, in the spine (leaving him a paraplegic who is found dead within months, bottles of pills and alcohol beside him), and gut-shoots Chee Ming Tsen, 22, who has the imitation pistol.

  Tsen, who loses part of his bowel, later tells authorities that he was given no chance to surrender but simply gunned down – also copping a bullet in the knee – while Tynan’s account is that he thought Tsen had fired at him. The ill-fated thieves are not underworld identities but rather foreign students with money problems. The bloody encounter at the TAB is not connected to the ambush.

  Four suspects in the double slaying in Walsh Street are charged and acquitted (the eventual widow of suspect Victor Pierce later tells reporters that her late husband was in fact guilty), while two other suspects are shot dead by police before the 1991 trial. One of them, Gary Abdullah, was killed in 1989 after he supposedly pulled a replica pistol on two officers, allegedly prompting Detective Cliff Lockwood to empty all six rounds of his service revolver into Abdullah and then grab his partner’s handgun and shoot him again
for good measure. Lockwood is later acquitted of Abdullah’s murder, but eventually jailed for supplying pseudoephedrine to a speed cook. As reported in the Age, when Lockwood was arrested on those charges, police found him smeared in excrement in a caravan outside Darwin.

  *

  In the build-up to the late eighties hunting season, Chris spends much of his adolescence in juvenile jail, getting accustomed to incarceration and criminal pecking orders, talking shop with other budding entrepreneurs of skulduggery and forming connections.

  He also tests the boundaries of the state’s discipline regime, absconding without a second thought when opportunity and impulse coincide.

  Which, if you listen to his mother, Annette Binse, is exactly how he was as a boy. ‘I’d ground him and he’d be out the window,’ she says, looking down at a table in her Sunshine North home in Melbourne’s western suburbs, piled high with the relentless incoming volumes of Chris’ never-ending legal documents, court and police transcripts, evidence photographs, affidavits, appeal paperwork, newspaper clippings and other urgent proof that the man in solitary still has presence.

  ‘There was no keeping him in.’ Annette’s throaty laugh is resigned, and she shakes her head. ‘I could have told them they wouldn’t be able to keep him in Turana,’ she says. ‘He was out straight up. Noticed some workmen had left a plank there so he opens a tap to flood some other area and then, when everyone’s distracted by that, he leans the plank up the wall and he’s up it and gone.’

  ‘I was friends with one of the officers who looked after Chris in Turana,’ says Annette, now in her late sixties. ‘Bill was a nice guy, and he offered to drop in a table that Chris had made in the workshop because he knew I came on public transport and couldn’t take it.’ She swigs a coffee and looks past the felled forest–worth of her son’s paperwork and out to the backyard vegetable garden. ‘I had a single-fronted house with a long hallway and we’re sitting in my kitchen having a cup of coffee when Chris comes running in.’ She shakes her head again. ‘He’s breathless; he’d just escaped.’ Annette throws up her hands and shrugs.

  ‘Chris stops dead short; he’s looking at the officer and the officer’s looking at him. “Oh my god,” I said, wondering what’s going to happen now. Is he going to notify the police?