The Northern Territory news Sat 31 Jul 2021
NT news
The Northern Territory news; NewspaperNT
2021-07-31
English
Community newspapers -- Northern Territory -- Darwin.; Australian newspapers -- Northern Territory -- Darwin.
News Corp Australia
Darwin
application/pdf
Copyright. Made available by the publisher under licence.
News Corp Australia
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00042
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/845914
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/846013
38 NEWS SATURDAY JULY 31 2021 NTNE01Z01MA - V1 Shalala first confronted the young Read about standing over a kid in the boys yard while Shalala was on remand, but when Shalala was convicted he was transferred to the medium security HMP Beechworth in the Victorian high country. Beechworth ran a guide-dog training program for St Pauls School for the Blind in Kew. We had to teach them how to walk and when to step ahead of you, said Shalala, and teach them how to cross roads: when you put your foot forward, they knew to jump in front. Shalala named his dog Mick after one of his co-offenders. Id just found out that hed given me up, so he was a f..king dog, said Shalala. On July 11, 1975, Shalala escaped from Beechworth with the dog. They were walking around the town when Shalala distressed to hear his mother was sick took off for the hills around Mt Stanley. And theyre the wildest mountains youll ever come across, said Shalala. He changed his mind about the escape when he nearly fell down a disused mineshaft. I said, Im not going to die here out in the wilderness, he said. Im going back. But I couldnt find my way back to the jail. He was out all night and knew he would be missed and charged so when he finally found the jail he tied Mick to the perimeter fence and headed into Beechworth to steal a car. I made it to the outskirts of town and the next minute boom! this dog turns up, he said. The dog had bitten 38 A Sydney gangster who fell foul of Mark Chopper Read in 1975, finally gets to tell his story of the bloody encounter in Mark Dapins new book Prison Break The day Choppers mate put axe in my head Mark Chopper Read (inset) recounted his version of the axe attack on Shalala in his book Road To Nowhere, written in 2011 about his 23 years in the prison system. Alec Shalala was a21-year-oldSydney gangsterwho had beenconvicted ofarmed robbery in Melbourne when Mark Brandon Chopper Read famously put an axe in his head in 1975. Shalala appears in the second Chopper book, in a cryptic poem Alex The Arab , in which a a hard old boy, is attacked by Read with a tomahawk and does not cry, squeal or vitally for Reads rhyming scheme squawk. Shalala told me his side of the story for the first time just as I had finished writing my latest book, Prison Break: Shantaram To The Bangkok Hilton, The Worlds Most Wanted Australians. He said: Even now, you can run your finger along my face, from my cheekbone all the way up to my ear, and you can feel the cut right through the bone.