Chopper Read and Mad Charlie, the Don who waited for his door to be opened

The two bodyguards went into the massage parlour with baseball bats. The boss stayed in the car.

It was St Kilda in 1974, and the boss was seventeen. His name was Charlie Hegyalji, and he was sitting in the back of a cherry red Ford Falcon parked across the footpath, reading The Godfather. On the drive over he had handed out the parts. One of his minders, a street fighter known only as Mad Archie, was to be Paulie Gatto. The other, a nineteen-year-old from Collingwood who already weighed eighteen stone, was to be Luca Brasi, the family's hit man. Somebody asked Charlie who he was going to be.

"I'm the Don, of course," he said.

You know me, Chopper. I've got everybody's number.

Charlie Hegyalji, ringing Read on his birthday, November 1998, as Read told it

The nineteen-year-old was Mark Brandon Read, and the street already called him Chopper. When he came back out of the parlour and looked round, the Don had not moved. So Read did what a bodyguard does. "I went back and opened the door of the car," he wrote. Charlie stepped out and told him, "That's right, Chopper: never forget the Don."

Read never did forget it. Twenty-four years later Charlie rang him to wish him a happy birthday. Six days after that, somebody was waiting for Charlie in his own front garden.

The story of the raid comes from one man, and it is Read. He put it in his first book, Chopper: From the Inside, written in prison and published in 1991, while Charlie was alive to argue with it. Nobody else has ever described that afternoon. Read's relationship with the truth was famously loose, and he said so himself. But of all the stories he told, it is the only one in which Chopper Read opens a car door for somebody else.

St Kilda was the right street for it. Fitzroy Street and the roads behind it were the public face of Melbourne's red-light district, and the law had pushed the brothels behind the fronts of massage parlours. A parlour took cash. It could not ring the police when men with bats came through the door. Read, Charlie and Archie worked their way through them, in St Kilda, Prahran, Armadale and Elsternwick. Read called it the parlour war.

He wanted a bigger one. He had, he wrote, "a total disregard for the so-called kingpins of the Melbourne underworld", and he drew up a death list of the older men who ran the city. The plan was to kill them all and put Charlie on top. "Had Charlie given the go-ahead in 1974, I had a death list and enough M26 hand grenades to knock a giant hole in the Melbourne underworld," he wrote.

Charlie never gave the word. He sat in the back of the car with his book.

He had arrived at thirteen, a refugee from Hungary, coming down the gangway at Station Pier in Port Melbourne. The crime reporters John Silvester and Andrew Rule, who edited Read's books and later wrote Charlie's own story, recorded the first question he asked his mother in Hungarian. "Where is the Statue of Liberty?"

He was in the wrong country, and he never got over it. "All he ever wanted to be was an American gangster in New York," Read told the reporters. "Through his fantasies he ended up becoming everything he wanted to be, except it was in the wrong country." The two of them went to see The Godfather together. Charlie, Read wrote, "studied Mafia crime books like a priest studied the Bible". In one of Read's two versions of the story, Charlie stood in the New York snow for a week to shake the hand of Carlo Gambino.

The nickname, Read said, went back to the time Charlie bit off an enemy's nose. When the street gave another criminal the name Machinegun Charlie, Mad Charlie grew jealous and tried to get people to call him something grander. It did not take.

The story Read told last about his friend was the darkest. It is also the one that can never be tested.

In 1975 a prisoner in D Division at Pentridge, a man who had murdered a nine-year-old boy the year before, was found hanged in his cell. The coroner recorded suicide. A local policeman never believed it. "It's hard to hang yourself from a doorknob in a cell," he said, "unless you've got a couple of mates helping you."

Thirty-eight years later Read sat down with Tara Brown of 60 Minutes. He was dying of liver cancer, and he called it the last interview. He told her he had killed four men, and that this was one of them. "Me and Mad Charlie walked into his cell," he said. "Charlie belted him to the ground. And I jumped up on his bunk."

Nobody was ever charged. By the time the interview went to air, Read was dead, and Charlie had been dead for fifteen years. Read had changed his body count many times, from nineteen in his first book down to four on television. If he was telling the truth this time, it bought Charlie nothing at all.

Inside Pentridge, Charlie lost his standing anyway. Read was fighting his own prison war, the Overcoat Gang war, and Charlie stayed out of it. "His failure to back me in the Overcoat Gang war in Pentridge meant that in the world of real blood and guts his name no longer counted," Read wrote. A bare-knuckle fighter called Frankie Waghorn beat Charlie twice in fair fights, and Charlie never got even. In Read's world that was the end of the Don.

They stayed friends. In 1987 Read came to him with the offer of another war, and Charlie said no. Read's verdict was blunt. "He had lost his guts for true violence."

Charlie had found an easier trade. There was more money in amphetamines than in robbing other criminals. By Silvester and Rule's account he kidnapped a chemist at gunpoint and drove him blindfolded to a property in Gippsland to cook for him. Another batch, cooked in Carlton, came out as a wet sludge, so he spread it on a tarpaulin to dry in the sun. "He called it 'sun-dried speed'," Read said.

In late 1989 somebody shot him in the stomach outside his house in Caulfield South. He survived. In 1991 Read's book came out with a chapter about him that was not kind. "All he has now are his mafia books and his fantasies and his collection of gangster videos," Read wrote. Charlie used to walk into a Prahran crime bookshop, pull Read's books off the shelf and ask the owner whether the author had made "a million dollars".

In 1997 he had a gun battle with another criminal outside a panel beater's in Prahran. Neither man was hit. Charlie spent a little over a year on remand before the charges were dropped, because the witnesses would not give evidence. He came out in July 1998 to find other men running his patch in St Kilda and Caulfield. He was owed more than $100,000. Detective Senior Sergeant Rowland Legg chose his words with care. "There was a little bit of business friction and there had been some ongoing discussions over the debt."

On 17 November 1998 Read turned forty-four, and his old boss rang to wish him a happy birthday. Read's number was unlisted, and he asked how Charlie had got it. "You know me, Chopper. I've got everybody's number." Charlie mentioned a small problem with a mutual friend, nothing he could not handle. Read heard something else in his voice. "He seemed anxious and I knew he had some sort of problem."

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On the evening of Sunday 22 November a business associate picked Charlie up. They drank at the London Tavern in Caulfield, the Grosvenor in Balaclava and the Newmarket in St Kilda, and two other men joined them along the way. From a pay phone in one of the hotels, Charlie rang Dino Dibra, a twenty-three-year-old dealer from Sunshine whom the police had listed as a suspected hit man. Dibra never told anyone what the call was about.

Some time after midnight Charlie called a Yellow Cab from a unit off Inkerman Street. He left half a stubby of beer behind. He had the driver drop him a block from home, an old habit. If anybody was waiting, he would come up behind them on foot.

The house on Bambra Road had been built to keep the world out. Ten cypress trees made a six-metre hedge along the street, with a tall timber fence behind them. A small white camera watched the stone path from the gate. Charlie kept notebooks full of the number plates of cars he thought were following him.

Just before one o'clock on the morning of Monday 23 November he opened the gate and took two steps along the path. A gunman was crouched under the first tree inside the fence. He fired five times. Four bullets hit Charlie in the head. There was a wound in his left hand, where he had put it up. He was forty-two.

The neighbours called the police. A patrol car came, and the officers searched the street with torches. The hedge hid the body from them, exactly as it had been planted to do, and the patrol car drove away. About seven hours later Charlie's partner glanced at the security screen and saw him lying on the path.

The camera had no tape in it. The sensor light over the path had stopped working, and he had never had it fixed. Silvester and Rule drew the obvious conclusion. "It is almost certain the killer knew he would not be filmed or illuminated. The odds are he had been a guest in the house or had been told by someone who had. Either way, it was an inside job."

Detectives put Dibra on their shortlist. Years later Read said on camera that he believed Dibra had done it. It was never tested. In October 2000 Dibra was shot dead outside his own house.

Nobody has ever been charged with the murder of Charlie Hegyalji. The Don who waited in the car for his bodyguard to open the door had walked through his own gate alone.

We tell the whole story of Chopper and Mad Charlie, in their own words and Read's, in our film on Gangland.