MARK Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read is serving an indefinite sentence in Risdon Prison, Tasmania, for allegedly shooting a former friend, Sidney Collins, in the chest while driving near Launceston.
The notorious standover man and gunman was originally charged with attempted murder, but the charge was amended to assault occasioning grievous bodily harm.
After the first jury failed to reach a decision, the second was split for three days, finally returning a majority verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to six years jail, but also declared a ‘Dangerous Criminal’ under section 392 of the Tasmanian Criminal Code, which meant he was not given a release date and could be kept in jail for the term of his natural life.
Read has spent more than 25 years preying on Australia’s underworld. He became the criminal that other criminals feared, a toecutter who hunted wealthy drug dealers and demanded protection money from them at the point of a gun.
In prison he led the feared ‘overcoat gang’, a group of violent inmates who controlled the maximum security divisions of Victoria’s biggest jail, Pentridge. He was stabbed, shot and bashed but continued his own one-man war. Read had his ears cut off by another prisoner as an act of defiance – proving that he was impervious to pain and that he could get out of the top-security H-Division.
Outside prison, he attempted to abduct a judge at gunpoint in a bizarre and futile plot to free a gang member who later betrayed him. He shot dead a drug dealer at point blank range outside a Melbourne nightclub while wearing a police issue bullet proof vest. It was a line ball who was more amazed when a jury acquitted him of murder on grounds of self defence – Read or the prosecution.
But while Read’s exploits with a gun and blowtorch have been the topic of many bar room conversations in police, legal and underworld circles, it his literary activities that have amazed many. The teenage delinquent who became a standover man, killer and long-term prisoner has now become one of Australia’s most successful authors.
He has written four best-selling books based on his intimate knowledge of the underworld. His ‘hands-on’ stories tell the cold-blooded story of Australia’s criminal class from the inside. He does not apologise for the crimes he has committed and confesses to many that he has never been charged with.
The impact and popularity of the books, written by a man who left school in year eight and has never been gainfully employed, has been staggering. Six figure sales put Read among Australia’s most successful authors of all time. He has been inundated with hundreds of fan letters. He has been visited in prison by women he has never met making outrageous propositions, by autograph hunters and by devout Christians who want to save his soul. He now has to have his visitors vetted.
His books have inspired a major movie project and he has been the subject of television, newspaper and magazine features in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and America.
One of the world’s most successful authors, Canadian William Gibson, used Read as the basis for one of his characters, standover man Keith Blackwell, in his latest best seller, Idoru. ‘Anything I know about the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal memoirs of Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read (Chopper from the Inside, Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has even fewer ears,’ Gibson wrote in the foreword to Idoru.
But while Read’s worldwide reputation continued to grow prison authorities became uncomfortable with their notorious inmate. Politicians and some lawyers began to complain that Read was becoming rich on profits indirectly derived from his life of crime. The truth was that the money was used to pay lawyers who would have otherwise been paid by the taxpayer through legal aid.
Prison authorities tried to stop him writing. One manuscript had to be smuggled from jail before it could be published. Eventually, he was given permission to continue writing, but only on the basis that any further works were ‘fiction’. Read obliged with a runaway best seller, Pulp Faction, which combined his intimate knowledge of the crime world and his natural ability as a story teller with his vivid imagination.
Read has been a model prisoner. He has married a Hobart woman, Mary Ann Read, and together they are buying a house.
He has been moved from maximum to medium security and is working to have his classification as a ‘Dangerous Criminal’ lifted so that he would be eligible for immediate parole. Not for the first time Read has said that he will turn his back on crime if and when he is released.
While inside he has undertaken a series of activities to show he is ready for release. He has completed a chainsaw course, and has the certificate to prove it, although some might wonder what use he might make of such a skill. He is a member of the prison fire brigade, although he is not allowed out of the prison to fight fires. This could prove that he has turned over a new leaf, given that his criminal record shows a conviction for burning down the house of a Melbourne drug dealer.
Read has been appointed prison barber. The thought of an earless man covered in tattoos, wearing a set of cobalt blue false teeth and brandishing a pair of scissors is a frightening one. He is no Edward Beale. Blow waves are not in his repertoire.
He is allowed out of jail under strict supervision to collect animals killed by cars on roads near the prison. They are collected to be fed to injured eagles as part of a wildlife program at Risdon. The spectacle of an earless prisoner carrying a dead wallaby is probably not one the Tasmanian Tourist Bureau is keen to promote.
Read has also taken up painting, and he has written a film script – in one weekend. But what he does best is write books.
This second work of fiction takes Read back to his roots, to the back streets of Melbourne where the underworld flourishes, where violence and crime are part of life. A bleak place that produced a cold-blooded gunman with no regrets who’s lived to tell the tale. So far.