Chopper by name…
We examine the shocking real-life crimes given the Hollywood treatment
His dad encouraged Chopper’s violent streak
Over four bloodthirsty decades, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read terrorised Australia’s seedy underworld.
The self-confessed sadistic killer, kidnapper, and torturer spent 23 years in jail – and wreaked just as much havoc behind bars as he did on the streets of Melbourne.
Yet, towards the end of his life, this infamous criminal turned his life around, becoming a best-selling author, painter and even releasing rap songs.
Born to a devout Seventhday Adventist mother and a war-veteran dad in Melbourne on 17 November 1954, Chopper didn’t have the happiest start in life.
He was in and out of children’s homes and grew up terrified of his parents. He later said that his fanatically religious mum would sneer that he ‘wasn’t a gift from God’, and his dad beat him regularly.
By the time he was in primary school, he’d been given his sinister sounding nickname Chopper, after a tough dog in the HannaBarbera cartoon Yakky Doodle.
After leaving school, Chopper roamed the streets of Melbourne with his brawling Surrey Road Gang. By the age of 15, in 1969, he reckoned he’d been on the ‘losing end of several hundred fights’.
That was when he was first sent to a mental institution, where he claimed to have been subjected to brutal electricshock treatment.
When his dreams of joining the Army were dashed because he had flat feet, he turned to crime.
It was his dad – a man who slept with a loaded rifle beside him – who encouraged Chopper’s violent streak, giving him weapons and teaching him a strict ‘moral’ code.
‘Just because you’re going to kill a man is no reason for discourtesy,’ he apparently told his son.
Chopper became immersed in Melbourne’s criminal underworld, working as a ‘standover man’
– robbing drug dealers and kidnapping and torturing other dangerous criminals.
Said to show no fear of pain or consequences, he was merciless towards his victims, and was rumoured to have killed multiple times.
Yet the ‘code’ his dad had taught him meant he only attacked what he considered low lives – drug dealers and pimps. He saw himself as a self-employed headhunter.
Renowned for his dry sense of humour, Read was covered in tattoos and had a mouth full of metal teeth.
He revelled in his ‘mad dog’ image and loved the attention it brought him.
Once, he burst into a nightclub with explosives under his arm and a lit cigar in his hand, threatening to blow up the entire building.
On 26 January 1978, he tried to kidnap a County Court judge at gunpoint – in court – in an attempt to force the release of his prison buddy Jimmy Loughnan.
Bursting into the courtroom, he held a sawn-off shotgun at Judge Bill Martin’s head and threatened to shoot him, before court staff and police overpowered him.
Read ended up being jailed for 13 years for that crime and his loyalty turned out to be misguided, anyway.
Loughnan later ended up stabbing Read in the belly, in
prison, causing him to lose several feet of intestine.
Read spent years in some of Australia’s toughest prisons and lapped up the notoriety this brought him. Lording it over other convicts behind bars with his Overcoat Gang, he once asked a fellow inmate to cut off his ears.
The blood loss was immense. No-one could believe he’d willingly mutilate himself like that.
The reason for this gruesome decision? It was the best way he could think of getting moved from Pentridge Prison’s brutal H Division block, which was reserved for high-security inmates.
During one stint in jail, Chopper began writing his autobiography, From the Inside – posting letters to ghost writers at The Age and Herald Sun newspapers.
Released in 1991, it was a bestseller.
For a short spell around this time, Read was out of jail. But he was soon back behind bars after shooting a motorcycle gang member in the stomach.
Chopper married his first wife Mary-Ann Hodge in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison in 1995. Four years later, once he was again a free man, the couple had their son Charlie, and set up home on a farm in Tasmania.
But marital bliss didn’t last.
In 2001, Read returned to Melbourne, where he reunited with his ex-girlfriend Margaret Cassar.
They married and had a son Roy in 2003. By now, having turned his back on crime, Chopper had a lot of stories to tell. There were more books. A live tour...
He also wrote a ‘children’s book for adults’, Hooky the Cripple – a characteristically violent tale – and became a painter.
In 2006, Read even released a rap album, Interview with a Madman.
Chopper once claimed to have been involved in killing 19 people and the attempted murder of 11 others.
He later reduced this figure to ‘about four or seven’, but also admitted that he’d ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn’.
In 2012, he revealed he had terminal liver cancer. In his last weeks, he gave a chilling final interview, confessing to four more murders.
He also admitted to having regrets about wasting his life in prison.
‘There are things
I did when I was younger that I wouldn’t do again,’ he said.
Mark ‘Chopper’ Read died in October 2013, aged 58.
But with books and an award-winning Hollywood film about his life, his place in Australian crime history – as one of the country’s most notorious career criminals – lingers on.