Chopper Unchopped

All eleven volumes of Chopper
’
s original memoirs
…
unchopped

Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read is Australia’s most famous standover man and one of its most prolific authors.

Now, for the very first time, all eleven volumes of Chopper’s memoirs are together in this special collector’s edition. From his criminal youth to his time in prison to his life as a reformed man, the entire journey is here.

This omnibus edition contains the following complete and unabridged books:

From the Inside: Chopper 1

Hits and Memories: Chopper 2

How to Shoot Friends and Influence People: Chopper 3

For the Term of His Unnatural Life: Chopper 4

Pulp Faction: Chopper 5

No Tears for a Tough Guy: Chopper 6

The Singing Defective: Chopper 7

The Sicilian Defence: Chopper 8

The Final Cut: Chopper 9

The Popcorn Gangster: Chopper 10.5

Last Man Standing: Chopper 11

Chopper is an icon in popular Australian culture and in the criminal underworld. Find out why in Chopper’s own words.

Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read is the son of a strict Seventh Day Adventist mother and a shell-shocked soldier who slept with a loaded gun at his side. Bullied at school, he grew up dreaming of revenge, determined to be the toughest in any company. He became a crime commando who terrorised drug dealers, pimps, thieves and armed robbers on the streets and in jail — but boasts he never hurt an innocent member of the public. From street fighter to standover man, gunman to underworld executioner, he has been earmarked for death a dozen times but has lived to tell the tale. This is it.

WHEN, 25 years ago, the brilliant British playwright Emlyn Williams spent a year writing an account of Britain’s most chilling child murder case — the Moors murders — he was repeatedly asked why a self-respecting writer would devote himself to such a ghastly subject.

Williams tackled the question in the foreword of his subsequent masterful chronicle of murder and its detection,
Beyond Belief.

‘My answer is a simple one’, he wrote. ‘For me, just as no physical aberration can ever be too extraordinary to interest the medical scientist, so no psychological phenomena can be forbidden to the serious and dispassionate writer, however ‘unsavoury’ the details. Who expects savour from a story of evil? When a shocking scandal blows up, with all the attendant sensationalism, there is in some people an instinct to avert the head and shovel the whole thing under the carpet, ‘I don’t want to know’. But some of us do want to know … the proper study of mankind is Man. And Man cannot be ignored because he has become vile.’

Prison is full of vile people: mostly habitual criminals, with a sprinkling of psychopaths and deviants, and not counting a few non-criminals paying the penalty for a moment of madness. For all the good intentions and rhetoric of governments, Pentridge, Long Bay, Boggo Road, Yatala and the like are not institutions of reform but keystones in the Australian underworld, an underworld which operates with the same ruthless efficiency behind bars as it does outside.

Criminals, especially in prison, have a rigid and jealously-maintained hierarchy, in which the price of upsetting the social order is usually injury or death. At the top of this brutal pyramid are the few who can instil fear in the many with their propensity for violence.

Of this few, none is better known than Mark Brandon Read, known as ‘Chopper’.

Read has been one of the most feared men in Australia for 15 years. A childhood runaway, a nightclub bouncer at 15, a street fighter at 17 and a notorious standover man at 19, he has carved a fearsome reputation for violence: not just with his hands, but with an armoury ranging from iron bars, knives and tomahawks to pistols, sawn-off shotguns and high-powered military weapons.

Read is hated by many in the underworld, even those Mr Bigs whose vast criminal wealth can buy the best protection. For Read is what the underworld calls a head-hunter — a lone wolf who plunders other criminals of the money they make from drug trafficking, gambling, vice or armed robbery.

And for all his efforts to invest his actions with some sort of vigilante justness, it is a sickening business. Headhunters use torture to discover what they want to know. Favourite methods include cutting off toes with boltcutters, knee capping with nail guns, burning feet with blowtorches, and nailing hands to tables. Worse, the victims are almost invariably murdered. Read, not surprisingly, attempts to rationalise such barbarism, mounting the bleak argument that his targets are ‘drug dealers’, themselves responsible for dozens of deaths, and who are invariably armed and willing to kill to defend their money.

By any civilised view, Mark Brandon Read is a monster. The question is: What made him like that? Was he born or made that way? There are interesting points to ponder.

Although Read is in the criminal world, he is not of it. Unlike most of those who he has been imprisoned with — and preyed on — for most of his adult life, he is not from a criminal family, condemned by breeding and circumstances to the endless cycle of crime and punishment. The opposite, in fact, appears to be true.

Read’s father was a law-abiding former soldier who held down respectable if undistinguished jobs before his retirement. And Read describes his estranged mother and sister as devout Christians. His mother, a strict Seventh Day Adventist, was the daughter of an Adventist clergyman, and his uncle is a well-known doctor who gives medical advice on the radio.

But underneath the outwardly respectable facade, there were stresses in the family which resulted in his parents being divorced when he was a teenager. Stresses which, although Read refuses to discuss them in detail, he often alludes to, saying he had a strange and miserable childhood.

One extraordinary fact is that as an infant he was placed in an orphanage for more than 18 months before being returned to his parents. Another is that he was sent to mental institutions as a teenager — where, he claims, he was given shock and deep sleep therapy. Yet another fact is that his father, like many former soldiers, exhibited (on his son’s evidence) some of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Read says his father slept with a loaded gun at his side and ordered the boy to call him at night if he was going to the lavatory, to avoid being shot as an intruder. And it was his father who taught him to fight and to shoot, apparently sparking Read’s adolescent obsession with firearms and military tactics.

Having said all that, it must be admitted Read is a more complex character than his reputation allows. As a lone gun in the criminal scene, he has studied the milieu with a critical eye — and a remarkable memory. Although verging on illiterate, because of fragmented schooling, he is a keen observer whose dry wit and eye for drollery shines through his tortured handwriting and primitive spelling.

Read is a ‘character’: street smart, witty and good company, but he admits he uses these characteristics as weapons to lull potential victims into dropping their guard before he strikes. He is a contradiction, an amusing and charming man who has devoted his life to committing acts considered barbaric even in the world of crime.

So why the book?

It has been said that writing is a neurotic art. It is no surprise that a man as ego-driven as Read has long toyed with the idea of a book on his life. He has said that many other major figures in Australia’s underworld history have been vilified without having the chance to tell their own stories. ‘Who ever heard Ned Kelly’s or Squizzy Taylor’s side of things?’ he asks.

Read sat down in his tiny cell in Pentridge’s H Division in 1991 and started work. For eight months he laboriously hand wrote more than 300 letters on jail issue paper. The result is a piecemeal but astonishingly frank insight not just of the man himself, but of crime in this country. It is chilling, but has the stamp of authenticity born of more than two decades in the underworld.

Read flippantly writes about torture and murder — and says he finds it hard to believe society could not see that by ‘culling’ drug dealers and gangsters he was doing the community a big favour. He admits that if he was convicted for all the crimes he has committed he would do ‘a 1000 years jail’.

In fact, Read confesses he has been involved in shooting and killings and torture sessions which have never come to light. It is easy to gloss over these crimes; Read speaks and writes in a disarmingly matter-of-fact, chatty way about brutality beyond ordinary people’s imagination.

He makes no apologies for his violent life, preferring not to shelter behind a disadvantaged childhood: ‘I don’t need to win a popularity contest, I am not running for public office and I don’t want to be a game show host,’ he writes. But he adds the disclaimer: ‘I have not hurt innocent members of the community; everyone I’ve got had it coming. I’m not a bully.’

Read’s police record speaks for itself. Like so many criminals, he graduated from the Children’s Court to boys’ homes and then to prison. He started committing minor crimes, from breaking into factories to street brawling, then became a standover heavyweight.

The impression he leaves is of a soldier who never found a war … except the one he has waged on the streets. He has convictions for assault by kicking, assault with a weapon, robbery, attempted escape, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, attempting to kidnap a judge at gunpoint, arson and shooting a drug dealer. In 1989 a Supreme Court Jury found him not guilty of murdering a Turkish drug dealer, Siam Ozerkam, outside a St Kilda nightclub. It was a verdict which both surprised and delighted Read.

Police who have dealt with Read say he is a bizarre blend of rat cunning and childlike innocence. Inspector Rod Porter of the Victoria Police, who has dealt with some of the hardest men in the underworld while serving in the armed robbery squad, regards Read as unique. ‘He is such a likeable bloke it is easy to forget what he is capable of. He tells you yarns which seem unlikely, but when you check them out they all tend to be true. I have never caught him fabricating stories from his past. He is one of the funniest but most violent men I have met. In my view there are two Mark Reads: the fun loving rogue who could laugh at anything, and the hard-nosed head-hunter who has no compassion for his victims.’

Read built an awesome reputation in Australian crime circles because of his love of spilling blood — and his indifferent attitude to his own safety. He has been shot, stabbed, bashed and beaten yet remains outwardly unperturbed. He has a standing price on his head from several crime cartels, but laughs off the threats.

Read says that as a standover man he is able to make dispassionate observations about his fellow crims. He is able to give an insider’s view on many of the major players in Australian crime. A criminal who delights in flouting both mainstream society and underworld conventions, it is typical of his contempt for the criminal world that in his self-proclaimed parting shot he has breached the crook’s most sacred law, the code of silence.

Read is proud of the fact that he is a huge name in crime and feared by underworld syndicate heads. But he also knows that having spent most of his life in jail — and living in constant fear of a knife or bullet in the back — his existence, in any reasonable terms, has been a total waste.

He claims he is prepared to tell all because he has had enough of crime and wants to move to Tasmania and try to live a normal life. Many criminals and as many police refuse to believe him. They say, sooner or later he will be back in the headlines … either as an offender or victim.

A postscript. Read’s memoirs are often horrifying, but there is a thread of gallows humour that leavens the litany of mayhem. In fact, some of his droll anecdotes reminds the reader of the classic Broadway stories of Damon Runyon.

One perceptive critic wrote of Runyon that, for all the humour, the characters’ underlying ruthlessness came through. He said that one of Runyon’s funniest stories,
A Sense of Humour,
was as ghastly as anything in modern fiction. The reverse is true of Read’s rough memoirs. Ghastly as they are, some of his stories are undeniably funny. Runyon, who rubbed shoulders with the Chopper Reads of New York 60 years ago, would have understood him very well.

Anyone who doubts that violent crime and humour can be literary bedfellows should take note of what the critic E.C. Bentley wrote of Runyon’s famous stories. Runyon, he said, ‘makes crime, and violence and predatory worthlessness, together with offhand decency where you least expect it … keenly interesting and frantically funny’.

While on the subject, Bentley quotes a character in a John Masefield novel who comments, ‘Courageous energy is always valued and remembered, and though the highwayman and others often use their energy wickedly, they still used it, and risked their lives to use it’.

Runyon himself once wrote: ‘legitimate guys are much interested in the doings of tough guys, and consider them romantic’.

Chopper Read puts it even more succinctly … ‘Posh people love gangsters’.

— John Silvester and Andrew Rule