Chopper Unchopped (45 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 two years, Read wrote almost daily to Silvester from both inside and outside jail. These letters formed the basis of Read’s best-selling autobiography,
Chopper From The Inside
, and this sequel,
Hits and Memories.

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 the producer of Melbourne radio 3AW’s breakfast program. His previous works include
Cuckoo
, the factual account of the ‘Mr Stinky’ murder investigation. He co-edited Read’s first book.

The editors would like to thank criminologist Rick T. Bloke and psychologist J.H.C Smith for their guidance.

A loner since his strict Seventh Day Adventist childhood, Mark Brandon Read grew into a streetfighter, standover man, gunman and underworld executioner. Although feared throughout the Australian crime world, Read admits to being a criminal failure because he has spent most of his adult life in jail. But he has become a notorious celebrity as his crime memories have topped bestseller lists. Now self-styled writer in residence at Tasmania’s Risdon Prison, he has completed his third volume of memoirs. This is it.

MARK Brandon Read is one of the most feared underworld executioners and standover men in Australian criminal history. And he is by far the best known, following the runaway success of two volumes of crime memoirs in which he candidly confesses to murder, arson and torture.

This, his third book, was written in a prison cell. At 38, the man known as ‘Chopper' faces spending the rest of his life in Tasmania's Risdon prison for a shooting he claims he did not commit.

The response to Read's first two books has been phenomenal. He has become a bizarre celebrity – receiving fan mail from as far afield as England and attracting tourists to the prison asking him to sign copies of his books. A Sydney film company has negotiated rights to the books, and a draft script has been commissioned.

But while Read's fame grows, fed by his remarkable ability to write about the most macabre affairs in a chatty, disarming vernacular, his life continues to be a disaster. The man who has already spent most of his adult years behind bars now faces the probability of never being free again. For Read is one of the few men in Australia's history who has been judged sane but sentenced to jail with no release date.

After being convicted in 1992 of shooting his former friend Sid Collins, Read was ‘given the key' — prison parlance for being locked up at the Governor's Pleasure. This sentence is usually reserved for the criminally insane and, in some states, for chronic sex offenders. Read is neither. He admits that he is a dangerous and violent man who has preyed on drug dealers and other career criminals, but he argues vehemently in his defence that he has never set out to hurt an ordinary citizen.

In 1993 Read appealed against his conviction. He was defeated, but has vowed to take the legal battle to the High Court, and is characteristically confident of acquittal.

After being released from Pentridge in November, 1991, where he had served a long term for shooting a drug dealer and burning the house of another, he moved to Launceston vowing he would never again be behind bars. It was an empty boast. Six months later he was back in jail, his fantasies of ‘peaceful retirement' exploded. His most loyal ally, the woman who had stuck by him for 10 years, was finally forced to agree there was no future in a relationship with a man facing the likelihood of life in prison.

While on the outside, Read rarely worked for a living, finding standover activities more profitable and less taxing. Ironically, it was relatively late in life that he found he did have a talent for making an honest dollar – by writing about his life and crimes and the underworld scene he had known since his days as a teenage tearaway. But the old adage that crime does not pay still applies: any author's royalties Read has earned have been spent on lawyers fighting to clear him of the Collins shooting.

Meanwhile, as Read continues to protest his innocence on the Collins matter, detectives from Melbourne and Sydney have said they want to interview him over certain unsolved major crimes on the mainland.

For this book Read has obtained confidential and extensive prison files relating to him under the Freedom of Information Act. These include psychological assessments, prison classification and discipline records. They provide a fascinating insight into the way a maverick criminal has dealt with prison bureaucracy for almost two decades — with a pungent mixture of childlike innocence and street cunning, hoodlum bravado and quaint, old-fashioned politeness. Will the real Chopper please stand up?

Read is the son of a strict Seventh Day Adventist woman who instructed him in fundamental Christianity and a war veteran father who instructed him in firearms and fighting from an early age. He was disciplined severely at home and 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 then, as he grew stronger, with his willingness to inflict it on others.

He concedes that he was not always the most skilled streetfighter, but he built a fearsome reputation for his willingness to inflict violence with absolutely no regard for the consequences, physical or legal. But there is a price for that brand of insanity: Read carries terrible scars from being repeatedly shot, stabbed and bashed – and has spent most of his adult life in jail. And for what? For all his bizarre cult status, his ‘kill-and-tell' revelations have distanced him even further from both mainstream society and the underworld. Even if he was willing, neither world would now accept him.

Read, with characteristic audacity, declares that none of this worries him. ‘While you keep getting up, you aren't beaten,' he says. ‘The opera ain't over ‘till someone shoots the fat lady.'

—
John Silvester and Andrew Rule

OF all the evil women I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some bad ones, the worst was not only one of the youngest but the best-looking.

Her name was Tanya. She had an angel’s face, but underneath the good looks she was a cunning, treacherous slut. I have never worked out how some women can have so much going for them and yet turn out such twisted bitches. If Tanya had played life straight, good men would have done anything for her, but that wouldn’t have been enough. She didn’t just want more. She wanted it all.

Tanya started out as a teenage runaway. Then she was a street pro, but instead of ending up in the gutter with a needle in her arm she climbed the ladder to massage parlors, then escort work and working as a stripper. She was a busy little bitch at the best of times. A real lady of the night, who loved her ‘work’.

She had a schoolgirl face and a tomboy haircut but she was, I admit, very cute and spunky-looking. Then she met Eddy and retired from the game, because she didn’t have to earn an ‘honest’ dollar anymore.

Tanya had been selling her body since she was 12 years old, and she fell in love with Eddy when she was 19. Seven years in that game would harden anybody, but I think she was tough as nails from the beginning, then got even tougher.

Eddy was an up-and-coming gangster from the western suburbs of Melbourne. He drove a Porsche, wore expensive jewellery, carried a gun, and was a pretty tough Italian crook. He made his money from drugs, and was making plenty of it. He was popular and respected, even feared, and his reputation was growing as fast as his bank balance.

But Eddy had a problem: His looks. He was wealthy, well-dressed and a pretty flash bloke who was just a bit too good looking for his own good. The girls loved him, and this burned Tanya up.

Tanya was a jealous lady. In fact, she had the heart of a scorpion and the brain of a snake, a tiny package of pure evil and vice, and it all came spitting out when she found out Eddy wanted to move her out, so that he could move a 17-year-old in.

Eddy’s lust would sign his own death warrant.

IT was Tanya who approached me about Eddy. She put the plan together and set him up nicely, cold-blooded as you please. She told me what she wanted and she gave me the key to his flat.

When I walked in the door with Dave the Jew, no-one heard a thing. When the bedroom door opened, Eddy looked up to see me and a sawn-off, double-barrel shotgun. He had his head between Tanya’s legs, and as he looked up at me, Tanya screamed: ‘Kill the dog, kill the dog!’ He thought she was screaming for him to kill me, but he was wrong … she was screaming for me to kill Eddy. But he must have realised the truth when she lifted her leg up and kicked out with her foot, catching him hard across the face.

I gave Eddy a slam across the face with the barrel of the shotgun. Dave stepped in and gave him a slight touch-up, then handcuffed him, hands behind his back and face down.

Tanya was on her feet by this time. She took me straight to the stash, and what a stash it was. There was cash, jewellery and drugs. She wanted the drugs, which was fair enough. Let her kill herself. There was a pound of pure speed and a 28-gram bag of heroin. She took that plus some personal jewellery and all Eddy’s gold chains – there were about 10 – and added them to the dozen she was already wearing.

There was about $4000 in notes. That went in my pocket. Tanya told me Eddy had two guns and another $4000 hidden in the car. She wanted the Porsche, but she got the keys and gave them to Dave and he went and got a .45 calibre automatic and a Colt .32 calibre revolver, plus some ammo and a bankroll of cash that would choke a horse.

While this was going on, Tanya was busy. Wearing only high heels and a dressing gown, she was running around packing her clothes – and grabbing anything else she wanted. Dave helped her pack the Porsche up with her things, and the various goodies she had her eye on. Then I said to her: ‘Hang on, we will take Eddy with us, so you can clean the flat out in your own sweet time. He won’t be back.’

We had planned to take Eddy back to a friend’s hotel in Fitzroy where we could deal with him in the cellar in our own way. It was a proven winner for us. But Tanya wanted to be there for the kill. Her eyes were ablaze. ‘Let me watch,’ she begged. Then she started to stab the sharp heel of her stiletto shoe down into Eddy’s back and shoulders, and she got down and bit him so hard it drew blood.

She wanted to stab him. We had to pull her up. Then she said, ‘Sit him up and you can screw me while he watches. Come on, Chopper.’

It was all getting a bit kinky for me. It was quite clear that Tanya was a sadistic whore and the whole thing was getting quite sleazy. I am a head hunter, not a perverted killer who has sex with the wives and the girlfriends of men just before they are about to die. Dave wasn’t pleased. He looked at me in a way which indicated total disgust.

Tanya said: ‘Let me come. I know where he has three buckets of junkie gold hidden.’ By this she meant stolen rings and jewellery, sold to Eddy by junkies in exchange for drugs. She also said there was another $5000 and three more guns hidden with the jewels. Little Tanya said Eddy rented a house in Footscray where he kept his gear. ‘I only know the street, not the number,’ she said.

I told her: ‘Tanya, you can’t watch nothing.’ She went mad and kicked the shit out of Eddy’s face. ‘Let me bite the dog’s dick off,’ she screamed.

‘Look,’ I told her. ‘We will take him. You stay here and pack your new car and we will ring you later.’ She wasn’t happy, but she had no choice.

Dave and I took Eddy, who seemed resigned and quiet, almost accepting death. Maybe the fact he knew he had been set up by his own girlfriend had numbed him. Whatever the reason, he was very peaceful. He even told us the number of the house in Footscray. So, instead of taking him to a pub in Fitzroy, we took him to his own rented house. We had him wrapped in a blanket. We got him into the house and found all the goodies and more.

We also found an electric nail gun.

Dave was convinced he was holding out, but I knew he was a broken man. Tanya had broken him. Nevertheless, I put a nail into his kneecap. But before I could reach the other knee, Dave said: ‘Hold on’.

Eddy’s eyes were closed. He was dead.

People don’t die from a knee capping. But Eddy was a heavy user of speed, and the combined effect of the drug, the emotional and mental shock, and the nail in his knee just blew his heart apart.

The nail gun was a fluke, but we kept it. And that’s not all. The house had about $20,000 in handyman’s tools stored in one bedroom.

We had to stack ‘Dead Eddy’ away in the freezer of a friend’s pub. From the time we grabbed Eddy until the time of his death was about 36 hours. I’m cutting this short. I think it is wise for all concerned.

We got rid of the body in a rather unique way. Eddy was left in a strange place or, should I say, four strange places. The Jew handled that. Meanwhile, I had to handle Tanya, which was fortunate for her.

You see, what dear little Tanya didn’t know is that the Jew said she had to die. But I’ve never killed a female, and I never could. Don’t ask me why, but to me it just didn’t seem right. I’m a bit of a fuddy duddy in that area.

So I didn’t kill Tanya, but I did go to see her and got her all sorted out. She had sold the contents of Eddy’s flat, and taken what she wanted. She told her friends and the busy-bodies that Eddy had run away with his 17-year-old slut.

I said to her: ‘If you don’t get in your new car and get your nice new things to some safe place, you are going on the missing list. I don’t want to hurt you, but my blue-eyed mate thinks you’d go well in a hole.’

Tanya was not stupid. She said she was always planning to go interstate, so she may as well get moving right away.

As we parted company she said: ‘Chopper, don’t you want to screw me?’ I looked at her and said: ‘Tanya, you’re one chick I don’t want to screw or screw with. See you later.’

I mightn’t have screwed Tanya, but she screwed me. I later heard that Eddy had kept $30,000 cash stuffed in a vacuum cleaner — a hiding place that Tanya had suggested but conveniently forgot while I was around. So I guess she had the last laugh on all concerned.

Tanya went west eventually and had a business involvement in the escort agency area. She has a string of strippers for bucks’ night, hotels and clubs, and is doing very well financially, I hear.

Although his death and the way he finished was rather sad, shed no tears for Fast Eddy. He was a heavy drug dealer, a killer who specialised in overdosing junkies who upset him, talked too much, or owed him money.

Yes, Eddy was bad news. But he had nothing on his darling Tanya. She was, to my way of thinking, one of the most dangerous and evil women I have ever known. I have seen plenty of sick-minded, black-hearted, cold-blooded sluts, but Tanya was the Devil’s personal whore. That chick was the Princess of Pain.

FOOTNOTE: While Eddy was lying in the freezer for five days waiting for disposal, me and the Jew did another two other jobs of work.

Busy, busy, busy. Ha, ha, ha.