Wasted: The true story of Jim McNeil, violent criminal and brilliant playwright by Ross Honeywill

Extract

The Road

As civilisation receded, Jim was forced to acknowledge that his life was over. Until now, he had refused to believe it. She'll be Jake, he'd thought. But it wasn't 'Jake' and wouldn't be 'Jake' any time soon.

Sydney ebbed as he watched fragments of his life evaporate through the prison van's back window. Five children passed one at a time through its bars. Valerie and their difficult decade flew out of sight, out of his cruel reach. Violence, laughter, confidence, hope – all drifted soundlessly beyond his grasp. Suddenly nothing of his life was left. There was only this van on this hot day, and this journey to Parramatta.

After a long time of pointless, sightless staring, Jim looked around him. If life was over, was this what 'no life' looked like?

The van was stifling. Dust floated through the shafts of sunlight that speared the air when the vehicle turned this way or that. Jim realised how thirsty he was, but there was no water. And anyway, he'd rather have a ciggie. Taking the makings out of his pocket, he automatically turned to offer a smoke to the sullen hulk of a man to his right but thought better of it; good tobacco would be in short supply from now on, and this was no time to start wasting fragments of a lifeless future. Even seated, the huge man towered above him, and Jim couldn't make out his features. Couldn't, or wouldn't.

Having been imprisoned in Victorian jails five times already, Jim knew the ropes: to look a fellow inmate in the eye was to invite retaliation, was seen as a challenge – to manhood? Supremacy? Territory? Personal hygiene? Who really knew? But it was dangerous and injudicious – of that he and every other man who had served time at Her Majesty's pleasure was certain. Prison was as unambiguous as death.

The giant sitting next to him gave off the odour of violent sex. It was a smell Jim knew. This man would be feared by everyone in the prison, and that made him a man for Jim to befriend.

The van had the worst suspension Jim had ever endured: every bump became a groin-crunching kick, every swerve a gun-barrel crack to the head, every braking a Glasgow kiss. It was so hot that the paint seemed to peel off in front of his eyes.

Sitting opposite Jim was a small man, about his size.

'What the fuck are you looking at?' the man hissed, rising from the bench to a half crouch, his head hitting the van roof. He shot Jim a menacing look, then turned to kick the metal panel at the back of the driver's cabin. He kicked repeatedly, furiously. 'Stop this fucking thing!' he screamed. 'I need a piss. Give me a drink. Stop this fucking van 'n' let me out. Let me out! Are you listening?'

The only response from the police was a savage acceleration that sent the man crashing backwards. He hit the floor with a sickening thud that punched the air out of his lungs and cracked his head against the back door. Up front, the police laughed and whooped.

None of the four seated men moved. Jim expected the fallen man to continue his tirade, but instead he whimpered like an injured dog in tongue-swallowing gulps that threatened to suck the life from his body.

'Shuddup,' the giant murmured, without conviction.

Jim bent down to offer his half-smoked ciggie, but the man just lay there in his own piss, looking at nothing, at his own future. On the bench opposite, a dark-skinned man wearing prison greens started to shake, but Jim remained passive. It was just violence, after all.

The van shuddered to a halt so suddenly that its cargo lurched against each other. A loud banging on both sides of the vehicle set up such a din that they all recoiled – all, that is, except the giant, who showed no sign of recognition.

The head of one of the police officers appeared at the open window in the back door, putting a grinning face to the truncheon raking back and forth across the bars.

'What's up, girls?' he asked. 'Looking for something to suck on, are yers? Well, how about this?' He pushed his truncheon through the bars. 'Suck on this, yer pieces of shit.'

The prisoners remained silent. One thing about crims: they might like to make a fuss for effect, but they knew when to shut up. Soon the officers' voices receded and an eternity passed as the van, sitting motionless in full summer sun, became as hot as a bullet in a barrel. The troublemaker lifted himself from the floor and sat back on the bench opposite Jim. He had the damp, defeated demeanour of a mental patient after electric-shock treatment. The electricity seemed to emanate from him and connect them all.

'Cunts,' said the giant quietly. No one knew if he was referring to them or the police, but after a tense moment they all started sniggering. At first the sniggers were slow and furtive, but soon they turned to laughter that hissed and roared like noxious gas escaping from a high-pressure tank.

Just then the van lurched into motion again, and what resembled a breeze from hell moved the stultifying air about.

'That did the trick,' said Jim. 'Nothing like a laugh to get the Jacks going.'

There was now no more Sydney through the back window, just bush and anonymous houses. The mesmeric passing of trees and the searing blue sky reminded Jim of the three months he had spent with his family on the road, immediately before his arrest. He loved the road. Until this trip, of course – this last trip to nowhere.

'Long stretch?' the dark-skinned transfer prisoner asked.

'Long enough,' answered Jim, and the men fell silent again. Long enough, he thought angrily. Long enough, all right. Seventeen fucking years.

Jim had known it was all over when he'd shot the policeman in the arse. He remembered and smirked. Jim McNeil hated police more than anyone or anything else on the planet, but he had known that shooting a Jack in the arse would be the end of the road. And a very long road it had been. In a heat daze, his mind wandered to the journey that had brought him here, and how it had all started in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Everything had started in St Kilda for Jim.

As a practising criminal, Jim McNeil had form, and plenty of it. A year earlier, on Christmas Day 1966, he'd been in the George Hotel in St Kilda with his wife, Valerie, his brother Patrick and close friends Michael Jordan and Patricia McGee, known to the McNeil kids as Uncle Mick and Aunty Pat. Everyone seemed to be an aunty or an uncle.

The pub was as rough and dangerous as the suburb; they were both filled with members of the brutal Painters and Dockers' Union, criminals and wannabe hard men. During his childhood, gunfire had been commonplace in St Kilda at night, but to Jim and Pat it was just the sound of normality, a sign that everything was as it should be.

The group needed money. And one way to get it when you grew up rough in St Kilda was to take it at gunpoint.

'I've spied a ripe pub in Preston,' said Pat, not bothering to lower his voice. The smell of beer and the pub noise on this Christmas Day was intoxicating to the conspirators.

Because women were not allowed in the front bar, the group was in the lounge bar, packed as usual, its only concession to yuletide a limp pine tree – more a branch than a tree – sitting in the corner in a bucket of St Kilda beach sand. The sand was covered in cigarette butts, and the tree, dropping needles like perilous memories, leaned towards the men's toilet. Valerie was glad to be free of the kids for a couple of hours – they were with Jim's sister Nancy, not far from the pub – but worried that they were so short of money.

Jim agreed that he and Valerie would drive over to take a closer look at the target in the next couple of days.

They drained the last of their drinks and Pat said brightly, 'One more for the sleigh? Ho, ho, ho,' but bar staff were always in short supply on public holidays. After a long wait, Jim grew impatient and went around to the front bar to order the drinks. As he stood waiting, a tall man next to him turned and said, 'You're McNeil, aren't you?'

'Guilty, your honour,' Jim said cheerfully and turned his back on the stranger.

'Well, I've got a bone to pick with you,' the man said, a little drunkenly.

Hand moving quickly, invisibly to the tall drinker, Jim picked up a half-full beer bottle from the dripping bar and smashed it across the man's nose, sending him reeling back into the drinking crowd, which spread like a working girl's legs. The man fell to the floor, face covered in blood and broken glass.

'Pick that bone,' said Jim.

The crowd cheered and the tide of drinkers flooded back, ignoring the groaning man on the floor. Although Jim was a short man of slight build, he was at once endlessly captivating and deadly. He had the quality of a coiled viper – a quality that attracted the type fascinated, even aroused, by danger.

Turning to 'Bent' Billy Ferguson, an acquaintance and himself a very willing criminal, Jim said, 'I'll bet that bloke couldn't even pronounce c–o–n–d–u–i–t,' spelling out the word. Bent Billy looked confused, so Jim just shrugged and said, 'Long story,' and carried the drinks back to the lounge.

The story was that, as a ten-year-old, Jim had known from his study of the dictionary that the word conduit was pronounced 'cundut'. So he would approach grown-ups in the front bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel and ask them innocently how to pronounce the word. They would patiently oblige the boy, but when he insisted they had mispronounced it, they would smash the bar with their fists and shout, 'It's 'con-dute', you little rat, 'con-dute',' and Jim would say, 'Do you wanna bet two bob?' Having sealed the bet, he'd produce the dictionary and pocket the cash. Jim had been shot, stabbed and bashed, but for him, the wound that would not heal was a love of language.

After the five had finished their drinks, Pat kissed Valerie and hugged Jim goodbye. Patrick McNeil loved his baby brother, had always loved him. 'I'd die for you, I would,' he whispered in Jim's ear. Pat would not be directly involved in the robbery. His was a quiet nature, and while he had a criminal history, Jim liked to keep him out of the action.

As they left the hotel, a stranger's head was being bashed into the roof of a gleaming new Holden parked outside the hotel. Three off-duty prostitutes watched and cheered the basher.

'What a pity,' Jim said to Mick. 'Such a nice shiny car.'

A week after New Year's, Jim picked up Valerie from York Street in Mount Evelyn, where she was living with the children while he moved about, and they set out for Preston. As they crossed Bell Street, there near the corner of Albert and Ovando Streets was the Olympic Hotel.

'Fuck me, it's huge,' muttered Jim.

The Olympic Hotel, a two-storey brick monolith occupying almost an entire block in Ovando Street, had been chosen on an insider's tip-off that the Friday night takings were rich and the Saturday morning security relaxed. This reconnaissance, a week before the robbery, was timed to be made under real conditions.

Rain tumbled down in Ovando Street as Jim parked the car and the pair hurried towards the Olympic. Jim sang a few lines of 'Just Walkin' in the Rain', the hit song by Johnnie Ray from the year the hotel had opened: 1956, just in time for the Melbourne Olympic Games.

Jim had a preference for hotels because they had little or no security and, consequently, were safer targets than banks, which he thought had too much security. You never knew when an armed guard would be on duty in a banking chamber.

Despite his preference, Jim was the prime suspect for at least half-a-dozen armed robberies of Melbourne TABs, including those in suburban Richmond and Hartwell. As a result, he had been subjected to vigorous and often violent questioning by police. Eyewitnesses to the Hartwell robbery had reported seeing a slight man with a sawn-off rifle threaten to shoot the two female tellers and a male punter. As the robber had left with his calico bag of cash, the witness recalled in the Sun newspaper, 'He called out: 'Thanks. It's been a pleasure to do business,' and then laughed.' Hotels, on the other hand, promised much for little risk. Not too little, mind: Jim had been caught and convicted five times.

A pattern of arrest and incarceration had produced an unnerving routine in Jim's married life. He had never been present at the birth of one of his children. He would joke over a drink that he could only remember he had five because there was one for every time he'd been locked up. 'I'd get out, knock her up and by the time it was cooking, I'd be pinched and back in prison again. She'd get knocked up and I'd get locked up. Missed every one.' Five children in just over ten years was a life-sapping burden for Valerie, one she had, at times, borne reluctantly. Jim was another such burden.

Once seated at a table in the lounge, Valerie wasted no time in questioning the wisdom of the job. 'This pub's too big, too risky,' she said. 'The Jacks'll put you away for good if this one goes bad.' After a long silence, she said, 'Are you listening to me? Or am I, as usual, being ignored?'

'Here we go again,' said Jim nastily, 'that old cracked record.' Valerie frequently complained that Jim would not look at her when they were out in public, would pay her no attention. 'You have no idea,' he said, 'what it feels like to live with fear every day.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Valerie muttered, looking sullenly at her drink.

Whenever Jim entered an unfamiliar room, he scanned the perimeter for entrances and exits, always choosing a place to sit or stand that was safe: safe from the surprise of a gunman approaching from behind and putting a bullet in his head. Jim could smell danger – it was like the burning cordite of old World War II bullets, his own personal fire alarm going off in his head every time he walked into a room. It was why he frequented the George, the Prince of Wales and other familiar watering holes. He knew the risks and everyone knew him, kept a lookout for him. It wasn't the police he feared, although he should have; it was the young ones out to make a name for themselves, or the brother of a man he'd bashed to within a stuttering breath of death.

It's how they survived, criminals like Jim McNeil – hard men who understood hard consequences; they developed a visceral skill for risk-assessment, feeling danger coming before it arrived.

Jim had done a quick check as they'd entered the Olympic; he wasn't well known here in the north and should have been perfectly safe. However, he'd still checked the entrances and found a table near a clear exit, where he could sit with his back to the wall and constantly scan the lounge for signs of danger.

As his eyes wandered, he thought about what he'd said to Valerie, about the fear. She would never understand; nobody could understand. It means, he thought, never relaxing in a room, never going into a house or a bar without looking for dangers. It means listening through nights for the sound of a car door slamming, the tread of feet, the ring of the doorbell that you send someone else to answer because it just might be your turn this time. It means playing a part always, pretending you're tough and willing and dangerous and all the rest of the Hollywood clichés you all adopt, except you have real people featuring in your show. And it means a lot of things much worse, like a conscience if you've got one, like things you don't care to remember. It means you've done things that can never be undone. It means that no one can forgive you in the end because you can't even forgive yourself, in your heart. It means you live in a jungle full of wild dogs wearing human clothes, all waiting for an opportunity to savage you, and you call them pal, and they call you friend, and you laugh and drink together, share your last quid with each other, tell each other that you love each other like brothers, but all the while you know the truth of each other, that the first one to fall wounded gets eaten on the spot . . .

'Jim!' Valerie hissed urgently and nodded towards a short man dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie checking the various tills. Jim jumped lightly to his feet and touched Valerie on the shoulder, indicating she should stay where she was at the table. He shadowed the manager to a small office where, through the casually open door, Jim saw the old-fashioned safe. Still in a reflective mood, he thought about Valerie and a wave of guilt almost suffocated him right where he stood, there in the hallway looking into a strange room at a complete stranger. Suddenly the manager turned and, seeing Jim, moved suspiciously towards the door.

'Where's the dunny, digger?' Jim asked.

The manager closed the door behind him and pointed back down the hall towards the lounge.

After spending the requisite amount of time in the gents, Jim calmly returned to Valerie and they left the hotel.

'We'll park the pinched car around the corner here in Ovando Street,' he told Valerie as they walked though the dampness. His wife's alarm had fuelled his own anxiety, but there was no time to organise another hit. They needed money and this would be the job, next Saturday.

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