To this day, Jack Karlson refuses to admit to using a stolen credit card at a Brisbane Chinese restaurant.
Online, the one-minute video of his dramatic public defence has become legendary. There are t-shirts, stubbie holders, wine, pins, magnets and mugs quoting his rant. He even cameoed in a popular music video.
And the memes … so many memes.
But the video's millions of viewers don't know the history of its star.
A succulent Chinese meal
On 11 October 1991, Karlson was treating a friend to lunch at one of his favourite local restaurants. He'd been there so many times that he'd often get a complimentary drink.
Had the food been plain, history could have played out very differently. But Karlson enjoyed the meals and his frequent returns had aroused the attention of a fraud investigator working for American Express: someone had been paying the restaurant using stolen credit cards.
According to a police detective, the investigator asked a restaurant worker about one of the names on the stolen cards, and the worker pointed at Karlson. The investigator called triple-0. Then, perhaps pushing for a quick capture, he reported Karlson as one of Queensland's most wanted.
Police surrounded the restaurant, corralled the waiting media (who had somehow gotten wind), and interrupted Karlson's lunch.
"He was as calm as anything," former police detective Adam Firman says of the moment he arrested Karlson in the restaurant.
"He was happy to go with us. Well, as happy as you can be, to be arrested. Until he saw all the media. And that's when he just went berserk."
The lines Karlson delivered have since become classic quotes in internet culture.
"Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!" Karlson declares to the cameras as he's wrestled into the police car.
"Have a look at the headlock here. See that chap over there? He… GET YOUR HAND OFF MY PENIS! This is the bloke who got me on the penis before. Why did you do this to me? For what reason? What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?"
The video of the rant has become so popular that a Google search for the phrase "succulent Chinese meal" now yields 10,000 more results than "delicious Chinese meal".
"As soon as we drove away, he stopped and he said, 'That was fun,'" Firman says.
"There was no fight getting him out of the car. Nothing. It was all put on for the cameras."
The drama behind the rant
The Brisbane police who arrested him that day didn't know that Karlson had been a criminal and a serial prison escapee. He was also a part-time actor.
By the time he was 34, Karlson had spent most of his life in homes and prisons.
His first escape was in 1966. He was on a train going from Boggo Road Gaol to face a breaking, entering and stealing charge at Maryborough Magistrates Court. He got out of his handcuffs and jumped off.
Two years later, after he had been locked up in McLeod Prison Farm on Victoria's French Island for another theft, he convinced a local fisherman to give him a lift to the mainland.
Three months after that, he was picked up in a stolen car carrying safe-breaking tools in Parramatta. Just before his trial, he impersonated a detective and walked out of his court cell. Finally, he was captured in an apartment on Sydney's North Shore.
That's when his life took a dramatic left turn.
Sentenced to eight years in Parramatta Gaol, Karlson was put in an unusually large cell with an inmate named Jim McNeil.
This chance encounter would become destiny manifest.
McNeil had heard about Karlson impersonating a detective, and he thought it was hilarious.
He welcomed Karlson into his cell. The two men bonded over making foul-tasting alcohol in the cell's washbasin from raisins and yeast, and shared histories.
They had both grown up poor, even by the standards of their rough-and-tumble neighbourhoods. Adults had abused them physically and sexually. And they'd both stolen and scammed a few shillings for their families when they saw the chance.
After encouragement from Karlson, McNeil wrote a play about cellmates who brewed grog. They put it on in prison, and Karlson played a leading role.
Both had discovered talents they didn't know they had. McNeil kept writing on his smuggled typewriter, and Karlson kept acting. The plays became a hit among young Sydney intellectuals, many who had been campaigning for prisoners' rights.
Within four years, their work got them out on parole a combined 13 years early.
Best friends
Karlson and McNeil's friendship continued outside the prison gates and they moved into a house in Richmond together.
The two men stuck out like sore thumbs in their new-found scene of artists and intellectuals.
Neither man had set foot in a theatre, but McNeil's plays were already being performed across Australia. He felt that, with the success of his plays, he'd never need to resort to crime again. On radio and in the press, he would give didactic rants about the brutality of the justice system.
Karlson, meanwhile, got parts in the prime-time crime dramas Homicide and Matlock Police.
They remained close.
"The lovely bloke. I love him," McNeil told an interviewer around the same time Karlson named his son Jim McNeil Karlson.
Karlson described them as best friends.
But McNeil's alcoholism killed him in 1982.
Karlson couldn't travel to the funeral in Sydney for legal reasons.
"I … with a bodgie [fake identity], booked up hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of flowers and wreaths," he says.
Final days
McNeil's plays weren't subtle. They were screeds aimed at a society that arrested and tormented unfortunate men for petty crimes.
"The message is: look what you're doing to people," he told one interviewer.
He went on to tell a story about an Aboriginal cellmate. "He was illiterate, he was poor. He had nothing. And he stole thruppence ha'penny. And then he got three and a half years. That's a penny a year.
"Prison is the best way to show what's wrong with the outside."
His final play was about two cellmates in Parramatta. He named it 'Jack', and finished it in a drunken haze.
"Do you know I'm here?" shouts Jack the character. "Do you give a f*** where I am? No. No, you don't give a f*** where I am. Pricks. Democrats."
Fifteen years later, Jack Karlson declared "Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!" to the waiting cameras and an enduring audience.
It would be his most unforgettable performance.
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