Chopper Unchopped (25 page)

In early 1991 investigative journalist John Silvester interviewed Mark Brandon Read in Pentridge Prison’s top security H Division for a series of reports in the
Herald-Sun.
Over the next eight months Read wrote Silvester more than 300 letters which are the basis of this book.

Silvester has been a Melbourne-based crime reporter since 1978. In 1990 he worked for the
Sunday Times
Insight team in London. He is co-author of
Inside Victoria: A Chronicle of Scandal
with Bob Bottom.

Andrew Rule is a former chief police reporter for
The Age,
feature writer for
The Herald
and television documentary producer. He is currently a sub-editor with the
Herald-Sun,
author and publisher. His previous works include
Cuckoo,
the best-selling factual account of the ‘Mr Stinky’ murder investigation.

Underworld executioner Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read was released from Pentridge Prison in November 1991, vowing never to return. He became a bizarre celebrity as his autobiography
Chopper From The Inside
became a bestseller. Six months later he was back in jail writing his second volume of memoirs. This is it.

They fear him, they hate him and slander him with lies,

And keep wanting to try him on for size.

They offer him cash, sex and free beers,

All just to sweeten the bloke with no ears.

He carries two guns ’cos he knows it’s smart,

One for the eyeball, one for the heart.

They pinched him on murder, and started to clap,

Then cried like babies when he beat the rap.

He’s laughed at them all, since ’69,

Knocked ’em all down, as they stood in a line.

But now he knows he’s had his day,

And headed for Tassie – just walked away.

MARK Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read was secretly released from Pentridge Prison on November 14, 1991, after serving nearly five years for shooting a drug dealer, criminal damage and arson.

Behind him was a total of more than 17 years in prison and a ghastly reputation for violence earned in a blood-spattered career as a streetfighter, standover man, gunman and underworld executioner. Ahead of him was an uncertain future.

Read is the son of a strict Seventh Day Adventist woman and a war-stressed former soldier who slept with a loaded gun at his side. His childhood was brutal, institutionalised and dislocated. As an infant he was placed in a babies home for many months before returning to his parents, who were later to separate.

Bullied and ridiculed at school because he was a slow learner and because of his mother’s unusual religious convictions, the young Read responded first by impressing his peers with his tolerance of pain — and then with his willingness to inflict it on others. ‘There are none so merciless as those who have been shown no mercy,’ he was to note later, in an oblique reference to his strange and stressful childhood.

Read made up for his inadequacies by building an armory of strengths. Naturally big and strong, he became ruthless, cunning and brave to the point of insanity. He carried a two-edged sword against the world: one edge was violence; the other was wit, and good humor, which he could use to conceal a conniving streak. Apart from his disturbed bloodlust, he was genuinely good company. Many police, prison officers — and those criminals who have not fallen victim to Read’s violence — regard him as a likeable rogue. But those in the underworld whom Read has declared his enemies see him as a psychotic tormentor who will stop at nothing to win any battle he takes on.

Read has spent all his adult life involved in violence. He justified it by stating that he preyed only on other criminals and left ordinary citizens alone. He has been stabbed, shot, bashed and run over — but has survived.

A self-confessed killer and torturer feared throughout the underworld, Read made no excuses for his life. He still doesn’t.

The first volume of Read’s autobiography,
Chopper From The Inside
, was published at the time of his release in late 1991. Based on more than 300 letters written from his cramped cell in Pentridge’s maximum security H Division, the book gave a unique insight into the mind of a man who could take lives and laugh about it. The best-selling book turned the poorly-educated felon into a bizarre celebrity.

Read was filmed for US and local television, and excerpts of his book were syndicated in London’s Fleet Street, New Zealand and every Australian state. But with his newfound fame came jealousy. Within months of starting a new life in Tasmania the dream started to sour. He was investigated by tax and social security departments after they were informed by unnamed ‘sources’ that the criminal turned author was getting huge royalties from his book. In fact, Read was struggling psychologically and financially to come to terms with being a free man. After half a lifetime behind bars, living on the outside was not as he had imagined. He continued to vow that he would go straight, but his associates in Tasmania included not only old mates but a new, dangerous breed – outlaw motorcycle gang members who shared Read’s obsession with firearms. Soon, the grapevine was humming that Read was starting to take financial shortcuts and heading back to crime. At one stage it was rumored he had returned to Melbourne and had been shot dead in Footscray in a gunbattle. Read was amused to hear the story while eating wiener schnitzel in a Launceston pub. But on May 14, 1992, he was charged with shooting one of his bikie mates, Sid Collins, with a 9mm Beretta pistol.

In spite of all Read had promised himself, his longtime girlfriend and police, he was back inside a cell just six months after his release. After a few heady months as an author and celebrity, he was now just another number in the Tasmanian prison system. He was convicted of the Collins shooting after two much-publicised trials: in the first the jury was dismissed after being unable to reach a verdict, and in the second the jury took three days to reach a majority verdict of guilty. Immediately, the Crown moved to have Read declared a dangerous offender, which would result in an indefinite sentence. On November 4, Mr Justice William Cox declared Read a dangerous criminal under Section 392 of the Tasmanian Criminal Code and ordered him to be detained at the Governor’s Pleasure. He said that had the Crown not made the application, the sentence for the offence in other circumstances would have been six years. Read has appealed.

Read maintains his innocence. But, philosophically, he has conceded there may be some rough justice because he has got away with so many acts of violence over the past 20 years. ‘I could see the irony in finally going down on the one frigging shooting I didn’t do after beating the system so many times before,’ he noted after the trial.

Read began work on his second book even before his arrest – although, with typical audacity, he states that, ‘like Oscar Wilde’, he does his best work behind bars. Read’s sequel takes the reader from the highs of gambling thousands at a legal casino to the lows of facing the rest of his life in jail. In between, he talks of his efforts to readjust to ‘civilian’ life — and reveals more of the crime stories that made his first book a national best-seller. A natural observer with an eye for detail, an ear for dialogue, a good memory and gallows humor, he gives an insider’s account of the Australian underworld: fixing an unblinking gaze on the brutality, corruption and warped code of values of the criminal fraternity. He identifies some of Australia’s high-profile criminals and police and pays them tribute – Chopper-style.

Even under the duress of standing trial for an offence that could ultimately send him to jail for life, Read produces from the dock a day-by-day account of the courtroom proceedings that are to decide his future.

Read’s first book created a storm of controversy and, in some critics’ minds, a moral dilemma. Why should a killer make money by boasting about the pain and suffering he has inflicted on other people?

Read’s reply was brutally direct: ‘No honest citizens hate me; they know I’m no threat to them. I don’t prey on the weak and the defenceless. No one I have shot hasn’t deserved it. My limp-wristed critics are really hypocrites. They don’t really care for my victims. They know the world is better off without drug dealers and other scum, but they want me either to shut up or cry crocodile tears … which I won’t. What do they care? I come from a different world and I make up the rules as I go along.

‘For outsiders, it’s like looking into a snake pit … you don’t really care which snake swallows the others. It just so happens that I’m the biggest snake … with the biggest appetite.

‘I find it the height of good humor that to some people my greatest crime is not so much killing and maiming the various drug dealers who have crossed my path, but that I refuse to apologise for it and wallow in some shonky show of public remorse in front of a TV camera.

‘I might be a psychopath, but I’m an honest psychopath.’

The reaction to Read’s first book was extraordinary. He received fan mail, offers for contract killings and requests for advice from people who wanted to murder their enemies. Total strangers visited him in jail asking him to sign copies of his book. Members of an occult group wanted to conscript him as a warlock. But the only offer he took up was to be the ‘godfather’ to a little girl whose mother has become a penfriend.

Despite his cult status Read remains a man without roots. With his ‘kill-and-tell’ memoirs he has distanced himself even further from the underworld but has also ensured that he will never be fully accepted in conventional society. He frightens both bad and good men. He is a man caught between the two worlds. To the civilised mainstream of society he is a monster. And in the underworld he is a failure who is feared, hated and can never be trusted.

Ultimately, criminals are judged not by their bravery or the scalps they collect but on their ability to make money and keep out of jail. By this criteria Read is a disaster. He suffers chronic injuries from being shot, stabbed, hit with a claw hammer and nearly kicked to death. Whether inside or out he will have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. He fears that his only claim to ‘morality’ — his virulent hatred of drugs — could be stripped from him. He confesses that he fears being set up with heroin so that he would be charged as a drug dealer. ‘I would rather die than have that happen,’ he writes.

And the future? For Read, it is bleak. When the doors of Pentridge opened that morning in November, 1991, he was given another chance. In just six months he had botched it.

–
John Silvester and Andrew Rule