Deadline: Jimmy Barnes learned there’s one thing better inside Pentridge

When Cold Chisel played a gig inside Pentridge Prison in 1982, Jimmy Barnes found out there was at least one thing that was better behind bars.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

Four walls, wash basin, doin’ coke

Drugs have always been a big thing in jails, so much so that hell-raising Jimmy Barnes found out four decades ago that prisoners had a better supply than he did outside.

Back then, the Cold Chisel frontman had his substance abuse issues, once saying “I wasn’t alive until I had two lines for breakfast.”

You’d think Barnes could have had a few hours away from temptation when the band did a show inside the high security Pentridge Prison at Coburg in 1982.

Wrong.

Deadline has been reminded of a book on the band, Wild Colonial Boys, which contains a Barnes anecdote about going behind the bluestone walls to play a set in the middle of the day.

“I thought I was pretty cool because I’d smuggled some vodka inside the guitar-tuning case,” Barnes recalled.

“These guys helped us load in and get the gear set up and looked after us during the day and I snuck the vodka out and asked, ‘Do you want a vodka?’

“One of the guys said, ‘Do you want a line?’

“They chopped me out a line of coke in B-division. They had better drugs than me in there.”

Cold Chisel outside Pentridge Prison’s B Division. Source: Wild Colonial Boys by Michael Lawrence

The band’s disrespect for authority and convention gave its members street credibility that made them popular with those in the big house.

Don Walker’s Four Walls is one of the great songs about prison life and numbers like Standing on the Outside, Tomorrow and Star Hotel were favourites in outlaw circles.

The Pentridge performance went down well with the detainees. Legendary DJ Billy Pinnell later described it as one of the most memorable shows he’d attended.

All of which reminds Deadline of Chopper Read’s yarn that he’d done time in Bendigo Prison with a close relative of Barnes, a strong man who allegedly set an unofficial Australian benchpressing record in the prison gym.

The monster barbell lift could never be recognised, of course, because old mate was as high as a kite on “speed” at the time.

Greazy riders

We hadn’t heard of a Kiwi gang called the Greazy Dogs until alerted they are the latest bikie club to pump out a slick video of a run by its members.

The Herald Sun recently outlined how Victorian outfits are releasing well-produced packages of their gatherings which police suspect are promotional material.

The Greazy Dogs’ production, featured on the Grid Sparta website, shows its riders rumbling through the New Zealand countryside with shots from ground level and drones.

There’s even an overlaid Greazy Dogs song of the metal genre which seems unlikely to trouble Spotify too much.

The Greazy Dogs, who are a frequent object law enforcement interest, are part of a busy patchwork of OMCG activity in the land of the long white cloud.

Clubs like Black Power, the Mongrel Mob and Head Hunters are the traditional heavy hitters and the Hells Angels have long been influential.

In recent years, the Comancheros have moved in on the locals’ patch. That’s after a number of their members were deported from Australia and started flexing their influence with sometimes violent consequences.

Lesser of two evils

Time-honoured St Kilda area drug dealer Ian Lesser isn’t the only one doing business around the Elsternwick patch of his established franchise.

Residents of the southern end of Orrong Rd are getting sick of late night comings and goings and obvious drug deals conducted from cars which often sport different registration plates on different nights.

One local has reported this to overworked police, telling them the dealer is the nephew of a neighbour who claims his young relative has had car trouble and often “borrows cars” from friends.

Trouble is, the same cars and “friends” keep turning up in Elsternwick late at night, staying only long enough to do business in what Meatloaf might call “the paradise of the dashboard light.”

“I’ve reported this to the police,” says our source. “I would be very interested to share info, license plates, cars, photos of customers and anything else we can do to (expletive) these guys off.”

Maybe old-school dealer Lesser can organise to clean out the upstarts.

Hizzoner nails horse traders

Ace Herald Sun court reporter Bek Cavanagh spotted a Supreme Court finding during the week that proves some judges have a wicked sense of humour, unlike the ponderous witticisms greeted with bogus chuckles from sycophantic barristers.

None of that lame stuff from Justice the Hon. Richard Hugo Muecke Attiwill, a relative newcomer to the bench who can turn a sharp line.

Justice Attiwill is unravelling a tangled web of conflicting assertions by two horseracing identities who each claim to be the rightful owner of an imported German galloper named Sammarco, currently cooling his expensive heels in the custody of trainer Ciaron Maher.

Apart from the waste of money and court time, there is the problem that the horse has to be legally owned by someone before it can be registered to race in Australia — meanwhile, it is missing races it might conceivably win.

Justice Attiwill’s pithy introduction is pure Hollywood:

“One racehorse. No registered owner. Two alleged owners. Training to be done and races to run. What to do?”

One racehorse with no registered owners and two alleged owners is a pickle Just Attiwill is trying to unpick.

There’s several thousand words after that but, naturally, they are highly legalistic and aren’t quite as entertaining.

The plaintiff is a Mr Latassa, the first defendant a Mr Tolj. If they used to be friends, they are no longer.

The only guarantee is that if the horse proves any good, the Latassa v Tolj disagreement will flare up and drag on.

No one gets too agitated about slow horses — but owners often fall out over good ones.

Gatto v Gangitano

Talking of horses and racing identities, a trotting scallywag recalls the times that two Carlton crew used to attend a prominent training property at Deer Park back before the untimely death of one of them, that being Alphonse Gangitano.

Gangitano and his associate Mick Gatto often dropped in to shoot the breeze about betting and other matters, which was not unusual.

But sometimes Big Al and even bigger Mick would each drive a harness horse onto the training track so they could race each other.