Deadline: Button Man intrigue sells out cinema

He spends most of his time alone in isolated parts of the Victorian Alps, so it’s a touch ironic Button Man intrigue has packed out a Melbourne cinema.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

BUTTON MAN THE MOVIE

They called him “Button Man”, and the nickname caught on much better than his real name ever would.

Its elusive owner became much-discussed as one of the more fascinating characters unearthed in the High Country disappearances case.

The man in question spends most of his time in isolated parts of the Victorian Alps, happy with his own company and resourceful enough to live for long stretches in tough country.

So it’s a touch ironic that the enigmatic figure who just wants to get away from the outside world is now hitting the big screen in the big city.

Button Man the movie is a fictional suspense flick in which a mysterious character interacts with two young women late at night at their remote campsite.

The intrigue around the man from the mountains is such that debut screenings at the Nova last weekend were a sellout, says the film’s creator Josh Todaro.

Those who have actually come face to face with Button Man in daylight say he is not quite the foreboding figure people might expect, given hearsay of spooky nocturnal meetings around deer hunters’ campfires and the like.

One well-placed source recently told the Herald Sun he’s a pretty good bloke, who doesn’t mind letting people know when they are mistreating the bush.

This does not extend to making people disappear, which several people have in the high country over the past decade.

Creators of the Button Man movie Josh Todaro and Jamie Lehman.

DRAGAN THEM THROUGH THE MUD

Dragan “Machine Gun Charlie” Arnautovic has given our public figures a fearful drive-by pasting in a letter Deadline would only publish fully if we were looking forward to unemployment.

The feared heroin dealer, kickboxer and dog lover wrote to former Corrections Minister Ed O’Donohue from Marngoneet Prison, accusing him of being too harsh with parole laws in the wake of Adrian Bayley’s murder of Jill Meagher back 2012.

But he then draws a bead on Mr O’Donohue’s former colleagues in politics and a few in the judiciary, claiming some are no better than those who fill our jails.

Among the community’s most notable figures, Arnautovic alleges, are people mixed up in “heinous sexual misconduct” concealed by cover-ups and confidential settlements.

“The spineless perpetrator likes of (name deleted) frequently hide behind the mental health card in order to circumvent the law and avoid prosecution,” Arnautovic fumes.

Dragan ‘Machine Gun Charlie’ Arnautovic has let his feelings be known.

He goes on to assert that most prisoners are locked up for breaching intervention orders or producing dirty urine samples in contravention of release conditions.

“This can hardly be perceived as serious crimes or threat to the community compared to former MP one (name deleted), former MP two (name deleted), former judicial figure one (name deleted) and former judicial figure two (name deleted),” he writes.

The rant then comes to a most civil conclusion.

“Thank you for your time and I anticipate you will appreciate my candour.”

The correspondence is indeed appreciated, Charlie. But it’s fair to say you’re no angel yourself.

The hard man who famously once finished a kickboxing bout with a broken arm has done plenty of jail time for combining his profession of heroin dealing with his hobby of running a martial arts gym. He came unstuck the most recent time because a Croatian-speaking cop happened to be listening to a phone tap of a conversation between Charlie and his ever-loving mother.

Police suggested in court later that dear old Mum was alerting him he’d better get over to her place and grab the stuff he had stashed under the house because a Telstra technician was coming to fix a telephone line.

As for loving dogs, Charlie was well known for keeping a very fierce, very big canine in his van with his drugs and cash.

Anyone who was buying from him got the message that if they wanted to rob him, they would have to open the van and face his dog, whose growl was terrifying. No one tried.

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CLICK AND COLLECT

Crime moves with the times. Proof of that is the Melbourne Hells Angel who has shown he is committed to innovation in his workplace.

Where standover work and debt collection once required the personal touch, so to speak, the inventive bikie has harnessed the power of modern technology.

Deadline has been told the outlaw mover and shaker has been using WhatsApp to inform people of what they owe and when he’ll be arriving to relieve them of it.

And who could blame him for using an app to put on the frighteners in these working-from-home times?

“It’s a bit of click and collect,” a source said last week.

CRY ME A RIVER

There is now a fresh candidate for the Ben Cousins cop-dodging iron man event.

In June, it was the two teenage gangsters who decided to bolt from the cops then swim their way to freedom in the Cascade Wetlands at Clyde.

They almost drowned.

Last week, Echuca cops chased a gentleman wanted for gun and theft offences as he avoided them in a Toyota Landcruiser earlier stolen from Mitiamo.

They eventually used stop-sticks to deflate his tyres so he drove to the Wharparilla Forest and started to swim the 100m across the Murray River to New South Wales.

The two cops were also up for a swim and pursued him until, a few minutes later, their quarry gave the game away and headed back to the southern shore where he was arrested without incident.

Cousins, of course, pioneered this event in 2006 when he bolted from cops who had pulled him over in Perth and swam the Swan River to freedom and a chequered future.

To be fair, the Brownlow medallist was much fitter than our Echuca tea leaf.

Ben Cousins back in his Swan River swimming days.

EXCLUSIVE: ROGUE BORDER MAIL

Rod Halsted of Albury was once a rogue border male. After starting work on the local newspaper a lifetime ago with the likes of future ABC political reporter Barrie Cassidy, Rod made the mistake of going to Sydney to work in pubs and clubs.

What were hobbies became vices and he got too close to heavyweight crims such as Bruce “Snapper” Cornwall in the 1970s and 1980s.

But after troubled times, hot Rod cooled down, straightened out and for decades has been a hardworking small businessman back in his hometown.

Last July, Rod was surprised to get a call from an irate stranger demanding to know where the motorbike was that he (the stranger) had paid $3000 for after answering a Facebook advertisement.

“After a bit of back and forth we worked out that somebody had opened a Facebook account in my name,” Rod tells us.

“That person was able to do that because they found my driver’s licence on the ground. I had reported the licence missing in April.”

The aggrieved fraud victim, Rowan Bougoure, apparently traced the real Rod by going to the address given on the driver’s licence and seeing his telephone number on a sign there.

On the basis that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” new buddies Rod and Rowan went to Albury police to report the rort.

Rowan gave police the details of the bank account in which he deposited $3000 for the motorbike he never got. It was the Commonwealth Bank in Dean St, Albury.

A constable took down all the facts but, four months later, nothing has happened. No one has been charged.

The fake profile is still up under Rod’s legal name of “Roger Halsted”, the way it appears on his driver’s licence.

Worst of all, Facebook has refused to take any action, and has the gall to assert the account was opened legitimately using a genuine identity document.

The fact that the said document was a stolen licence reported lost months earlier does not seem to compute with the social media giant.

Meanwhile, the fake Facebook profile is still online, using the photograph of Rod lifted from his licence.

The crook is still offering goods for sale, looking to hook other suckers. Not surprisingly, he is using Rod’s identity on other sites as well.

Rod and his family have reported the identity theft to Facebook at least a dozen times but still it refuses to intervene.

His question is this: does Facebook’s recalcitrance mean it is aiding and abetting a crime?