Mayhem

by Matthew Thompson

  ‘But Bill didn’t say anything, and Chris didn’t know how to react. So they’re facing each other off. Eventually Bill advised Chris to go report to a police station. Chris did his throaty chuckle and took off again. No chance in hell was he going to report to a police station.’

  Annette says that she and the guard sat and finished their coffees, not really talking much. ‘Bill had a soft spot for Chris. Most of them did. Chris wasn’t mean-spirited like some of the boys. He was charming, athletic, always a big smile. He just couldn’t be contained.’

  Annette flicks through a few old snapshots of Chris at Turana: here he stands, grinning, in the yard, pointing at the wall where he’d scarpered while a long-suffering staffer sits slumped beside him; here’s one of Chris hunched over in a workshop, wearing a woollen cap and looking like a kid dressing up as a convict.

  ‘I don’t know who that guy is but I know how he feels,’ says Annette. ‘Bill was a decent guy but he had problems and ended up shooting himself.’

  *

  Annette goes out for a cigarette while I leaf through the whateverness of it all: a transcript of the police interview with a girlfriend, Silvia, who went through most of the meth-fuelled siege with him; transcripts of interviews with Roxy, the girlfriend who drove getaway for him a decade earlier; ever more affidavits accusing his lawyer of selling him out.

  Here’s a copy of a search warrant. Let’s see what’s tucked in with it, in the clear plastic sleeve.

  Pages and pages of Property Seizure Records listing the contents of shipping containers rented by Chris.

  Out slides page 5 of 13, showing:

  1 x sawn off single barrel ‘Sportco’ shotgun

  1 x shotgun cartridge

  1 x green bag

  1 x Ruger handgun

  1 x Thompson firearm

  Round magazine, magazine clip, timber stock + timber barrel cover

  Assorted firearm parts

  Thompson submachine gun? What else did he have in storage? He likes his bikes – there’s ten of them, road and trail:

  Honda CBR1000 black/white

  Kawasaki ZX6R black

  Yamaha Y2R1 black

  Megelli white

  Yamaha Y2F R1 blue

  Atomik red

  Apna red

  Harley Davidson black

  Harley Davidson black

  Buell black

  Bunch of rego plates, including BAD-013, BADNES, HEKTK-1.

  Flicking on, we’ve got three sets of handcuffs, seventeen or eighteen balaclavas, five Nokia phones, assorted ammunition, a speed loader, gloves, cable ties, and another round-magazine for the Tommy gun, plus ELEY subsonic cartridges for quiet shooting. Here are a couple of bottles of Penfolds, three of Chivas Regal, some Möet & Chandon, and a pair each of blue label and black label Johnnie Walker. Some bags: one holding a stack of masks, gloves, screwdrivers, a bottle of red liquid, a taser, a holster and some plastic strapping. There’s a black backpack with ammo in it.

  Whoa, starting on page 8 of the seizure record, the cops have listed what they found in a black and orange bag:

  Red trigger

  1 x stick of explosive

  1 x remote

  5 x sticks of explosives

  1 x Ruger .22 sawn off single barrel firearm with silencer

  2 x magazines with rounds

  2 x box of rounds

  1 x stick of explosives

  Yellow and white leg wires

  1 x mask

  Pair of orange gloves

  Box white latex gloves

  Spent rounds

  Pair of pliers

  1 x scope + black ‘cummerbund’ waist strap

  Christ, it keeps going and going. Here’s a suitcase stuffed with:

  2 x wigs

  Masks

  Disposable hooded overalls

  1 x ornamental grenade

  Assorted ammunition

  Assorted paperwork

  1 x Motorola radio

  A backpack containing:

  1 x black ballistic vest + notebook

  And then there’s a range of loose items, including masks, a wig, a grey hat, a Dino lock-pick gun, unidentified purple pills, more rego plates, an Australian passport in the name of Chris Pecotic, prepaid SIM cards and a camouflage suit. And a pair of sunglasses.

  *

  ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it,’ says Annette, back from her ciggie. ‘Thinks he’s James Bond. It does the head in. He’s been doing my head in since he was a child and he’s still doing my head in. I would rather have had 24 kids than one Chris.’

  ‘What’s all this stuff for?’ I ask. ‘Explosives?’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘He’s even got a grenade – can you believe it?’

  ‘A Thompson submachine gun.’

  ‘I know, I know. The mind boggles.’ Again, she shakes her head. ‘He’s got these fantasies, these delusions, that he’s some kind of commando. You’ll see it; he signs some of his letters “solja” – that’s his word for it. So I think he just collects everything he can that matches the fantasy. Can’t help himself.’ She mutters about the grenade and then goes to find something.

  ‘He had these printed when he was out once and decided to become a debt collector.’ Annette hands me a black business card.

  8. THE ROUTE TO HECTIC

  STARTING IN THE 1940S: FROM CROATIA TO PENTRIDGE

  Chris’ road trip starts in Yugoslavia during World War II.

  CHRIS:

  My father, Steve Pecotic, was one year old when he lost his father – a victim of war in Croatia.

  My father had nothing to remember about his father. He and his two siblings were brought up in hardship in a small peasant village by their mother.

  She had witnessed the murder. It had a profound impact on her. She was later to suffer severe forms of schizophrenia where she not only heard voices, but saw images.

  When I have been psychotic from trauma and ice, I too have seen things so this is very haunting and vivid to me. My father’s sister was also diagnosed with similar strains of madness. Is this hereditary? Have I now passed this condition onto my daughter?

  When we were living in St Albans in Melbourne my mother and father separated due to domestic violence. I was about four years old and my brother, Barry, about two. I don’t recall ever seeing my dad hit my mother, but I was exposed to a lot of yelling-abuse by my dad.

  My mother left my dad, taking us with her, and was living in a bungalow at the rear of a house.

  I was my dad’s boy and loved being with him, even though he was very hard on us. My brother was Mum’s boy, but I would look forward to seeing my dad on his access weekends.

  He raised me on stories of his exploits as a wayward kid. These were his family stories for me.

  From his poor village in Croatia, he’d terrorise the locals with a sawn-off shotgun. He was a kind of bandit and then fled to Australia.

  I found his tales to be funny. Criminality was nothing to be frowned upon.

  And so I never really gave crime a second thought.

  I entered the life with petty thefts of chewing gum from gum racks at supermarkets.

  I’d seek out the closed checkouts, empty the gum-racks into a plastic bag, and then exit the store.

  My first aspirations towards armed robbery formed when I did banking for my sick grandmother.

  The bank was on a corner; sometimes I would see the guards arrive delivering the cash. I studied their routines.

  As an 8- or 9-year-old, I’d cock my right hand and tell them to give me the money.

  From that time on I dreamt of robbing them.

  My mother formed a relationship with a man who became my stepfather. His name was Hans Binse.

  But I did not enjoy the presence of my stepfather – it was like my attachment to my dad was supposed to be severed and replaced with a substitute. He tried his best but he could not be my dad ever.

  And later they got divorced, too.

  My dad at an early age
encouraged me into petty theft from work sites. He was a subcontractor carpenter, and would have me keep cocky when he ventured into the garages of those jobs he was at, and lift items.

  I wanted my dad to look after me, and when I was allowed to choose who to live with I chose my dad. I wanted to be at home with him, but he got too angry, too violent. His temper was too brutal. Living with him full time was not possible. I couldn’t stay for long.

  When I returned to my mother’s from the weekend visits, I would rebel. I was a delinquent and would run away from home, because I felt I did not fit in at Mum’s place either. I would break into cars to sleep in and steal coins from them to buy food to survive, coming to the attention of police who arrested me and returned me to my mother who would complain I was bringing the police to her place and she would talk about what her neighbours would think.

  I’d get arrested and returned to my mother’s home and then I’d run away again.

  My mum could not control me. I was constantly rebellious, and as a result I was abandoned by my mother who took me to court to have me deemed uncontrollable and made a ward of the state.

  The courts had sought that I be assessed by psychiatrists, but this was a six to eight week wait, and by the time my file arrived on the desk I had run away again.

  Now I was made a ward of the state, and nobody really ever got to find out why I was running away.

  At thirteen years of age I got locked up in Baltara, the under-fourteen section of Turana.

  At this tender age I was subjected to bashings by staff in the Warrawong punishment block. They told us kids that the bashings were to deter us from coming back to that section.

  Yet when I was near release, I would inexplicably run away.

  I had a fear of going home, I now feel, because I didn’t want to be there at all.

  So began my life of crime at thirteen. Bullying was very prevalent at Baltara, and if I wasn’t facing that I was spending long periods alone in a cell. No TV or anything.

  To this day I refuse to forgive my mother for this abandonment of me, and for all the violence I was subjected to as a minor.

  I hated being in custody. It destroyed my spirit. It crushed me.

  And from that moment on, figures of authority – the custodial staff – bashed us, bashed me, and so formed the enmity towards the government and guards that would shape my life for so long.

  Over the years ahead I would be bashed many times by police, sometimes savagely when they wanted to know where the cash was. Other times they did it thinking they could belt me into giving up others – yet torture made me even stauncher – or because they wanted to teach me who’s boss. Or because I was a cheeky cunt.

  Released from Baltara boys’ home during the day to go to school, I began using drugs, stealing, and returning to custody.

  My life of crime had begun in earnest. Listening to older kids talk about their escapes and exploits appealed to me.

  I become a pot smoker at fourteen, and then experimented with all types of drugs including speed and even heroin.

  I rebelled. I competed with fate. And when I was in that mindset, I escaped at the first opportunity.

  This caused me to accumulate a three-year term as a juvenile: the maximum a kid could get in children’s courts at the time.

  Due to my frequent escapes, I was housed in the most secure location they had: Poplar House at Turana. A mini-jail for kids: a high-walled fortress with many rolls of barbed wire.

  I escaped from this location just to prove I could crack it. And got taken back. And escaped again. And got taken back again.

  Bored and restless, I spent a few years there.

  When I escaped, it started to become out of sheer boredom with the place – not due to want of liberty. What liberty is there outside as a kid with no family, no home, a mother who went to court to get rid of him?

  I was transferred to Malmsbury youth training centre at seventeen, and then, after the death of my beloved grandmother in 1986, I escaped and went on a drug-fuelled crime spree for four weeks until being arrested and sent to Pentridge, a maximum-security adult prison where ugliness and violence were the air and water.

  I was seventeen years old.

  9. BORN FROM TROUBLE

  1920S–1960S:

  EUROPE TO AUSTRALIA

  Chris is chomping at the bit to tell his story, but before he lets rip let’s step back a little further to see the flow of life. No one comes from nowhere. We are all children of something.

  A baby girl is born in 1926 to German parents living in Gross-Wender, an old German settlement in what has since become the nation of Ukraine. One day, when Sophia Regina Scheck is a teenager, the Soviet authorities order her family, along with a lot of other ethnic German families, to be deported to remote labour camps in the east. With everybody gathered at a railway station, Sophia frets that they have not packed her father’s photographs, so she darts home to grab them. When she returns, the station is empty. The train has come and gone. The dark-haired girl seizes up in shock and grief. She never sees or hears from her family again.

  A friendly Russian family with a girl near her age takes in Sophia, who speaks Russian as a native, and they pass off the teen as one of their own. This saves Sophia from the gulags but proves little protection as World War II explodes. History’s biggest and most brutal military clash, the Nazi–Soviet confrontation kills tens of millions of civilians and soldiers, leaves as many people homeless, and lays waste to vast regions – including one building that Sophia huddles in under bombardment, its walls collapsing around her but leaving the girl unscathed.

  For the Ukraine area, the conflict is the latest in a chain of apocalypses, following as it does the death of millions from starvation in a famine that the Soviets caused, the mass killing and deportation of millions seen as resistant to communism, and the preceding civil war that had landed the communists in power. Young Sophia might survive World War II but not without her mind fracturing.

  After the Nazi onslaught stalls and breaks, Red Army troops push west, often committing depraved acts in areas they recapture.

  And in a forest of this cursed place, a pack of Soviet soldiers brutalise Sophia and her adoptive sister, breaking something in Sophia’s mind. The Devil starts talking to her, goading and taunting as he will do for the rest of her life, and she starts seeing things that aren’t there.

  With the war over but the region pulverised and the Soviets clamping down on much of Central and Eastern Europe, Sophia goes west, working as a nurse in occupied Germany. One of her patients is a sternly self-possessed Russian-speaker who has been shot in the gut.

  Sophia marries the man, who goes by the name Joseph Adamowicz.

  Never will he tell her or the children she will bear to him what happened to him before they met. He never says where he comes from, and for a long time Joseph claims to be three years older than Sophia, yet later it seems that they were both born in 1926.

  As Christmas 1946 approaches, Sophia gives birth to their first child. This daughter, Annette, is born in the town of Mölln, which, as folklore has it, is the burial place of legendary medieval trickster and highway robber Till Eulenspiegel.

  This cheeky peasant provoked everyone around him with his relentless farting and practical jokes, many of which involved tricking people into handling or even eating shit. As a young fellow out riding with his dad, Till would expose his arse to people behind them. He once pranked a publican by crapping all over the inside of a folding table at the tavern, thereby delivering a foul surprise when lunchtime came and the tables were unfolded for diners. Forever showing up his social betters as hypocrites and fools, this merry chap – who served time for armed robbery – has become a symbol of resistance in parts of Europe, where all manner of people wish others to eat shit.

  Sophia, Joseph and Annette live as Displaced Persons in Germany for a few years and then in 1950 set sail to Australia on the SS Nelly, arriving that June as part of the huge postwar European migrati
on. They settle in the western Melbourne suburb of St Albans, the cold and stern Joseph working as a builder while Sophia struggles to tend to their growing family as the Devil steps up his torments. A child herself, Annette would sometimes lead her little sisters on middle-of-the-night walks around the local shops: anything to spare her siblings the onslaught of a mother in the grip of madness.

  One time Sophia locks the children inside a bungalow and spits on them as Joseph hammers on the door. Neither Joseph nor any doctor explain schizophrenia or anything like it to their kids, not even when Sophia is hospitalised for stretches and pleads with her family to free her. ‘Please,’ she says, reeling from another round of shock treatment. ‘They’re trying to kill me.’

  Annette assumes more and more responsibility in the household especially when, on her fifteenth birthday, Joseph tells her that he is leaving.

  Annette does what she can to care for everybody while trying to have her own teenage years.

  10. THE POLICE WELCOME A NEW FAMILY TO MELBOURNE

  1952:

  ST ALBANS

  ANNETTE:

  The first place we came to after the migrant camp was St Albans. Across the road was a neighbour with a milk bar. My mother used to look after his child while his wife was working.

  He had a German shepherd and this dog of his would be barking, barking, barking, all night.

  Dad complained about it to him but nothing changed.

  Then one morning the dog was found poisoned, so the man called the police and blamed Dad. But there was no evidence Dad was involved, and I don’t think he was. There were other neighbours, too, that would have been complaining about the dog.

  So a van pulls up with three policeman inside and they drag Dad out of the house, slam him against the van, and start beating him. I run outside and I’m screaming and screaming and screaming, ‘Leave my daddy! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’