Chopper Unchopped (91 page)

Crime fiction writers, from bored academics to Bondi butchers, have tried writing about the underworld. Only one has researched it with a gun in his hand.

AS a criminal, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read is a failure. He has spent most of his adult life in jail. He has been betrayed, shot, stabbed, lost his ears and has little money left because of expensive legal battles.

But with his lawyers fighting for an early release date from Tasmania’s Risdon prison, the longtime standover man and self-confessed killer is set to embark on a new career – as Australia’s only celebrity gangster.

He has a new set of cobalt-blue teeth, a new wife, and has made a new vow (not for the first time) to go straight. If and when he is released.

If he sticks to his word, Read could earn more money talking and writing about crime than he ever made committing it. He has already written four bestselling books based on his life – books that sparked such public outrage that he believes his writings have made him too big a name to be quietly released. Read believes he is being punished for having admitted and bragged about crimes for which he has never been charged, let alone convicted of. Now he has moved into writing crime fiction based on his three decades in the underworld.

He has also signed a film deal, and could be recruited on to the lucrative public-speaking circuit.

Book retailers have lobbied him to write a cookbook and a paperback of underworld jokes, and he has reviewed films for a Melbourne radio station. He has a constant stream of visitors at the jail seeking his autograph.

Read can be funny, witty and charming, but it is impossible to ignore the fact his life has been steeped in violence. He is a career criminal whose background makes him one of Australia’s blackest cult heroes.

His background simultaneously repels and attracts. Like sightseers at a traffic crash, people are drawn to look and are horrified by what they see.

READ was born the son of a war-stressed former soldier who slept with a gun at his side, and a devout Seventh Day Adventist mother. He spent 18 months in a Melbourne orphanage as an infant before being returned to the family home.

Read has never used his childhood as an excuse for his later criminal behaviour, but admits he was subjected to violence at home and at school.

His parents split and he lived with his father, who told him: ‘Don’t ask for mercy from a man who has been shown no mercy.’ At school Read was slow, almost illiterate. He ran away from home six times between the ages of 10 and 15. As a teenager he was diagnosed as autistic and was institutionalised. He claimed he received the controversial deep-sleep therapy and repeated shock therapy.

Bullied at school, Read found he had two skills: he could make people laugh and, as he grew stronger, he could make them frightened.

He was later to combine the two to turn himself into a feared underworld headhunter, a criminal who lives off the underworld, standing over, bashing and – if need be – killing other members of the underworld.

Read used his humour to make criminals, police and prison officers relax. He would often jolly his underworld targets into lowering their guard. Then he would strike.

But, as a teenage street offender his criminal history was unexceptional. He was in a northern suburbs street gang, which was slightly more ruthless and violent than most.

Many hooligans grow out of the adolescent culture of violence, but Read revelled in it. By the time he was in Pentridge he was ready to graduate to what he considered the big league. He gravitated towards older criminals such as painter and docker and convicted murderer Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley, and the notorious ‘toe-cutter’ Linus Patrick ‘Jimmy the Pom’ Driscoll.

Read may not have learnt a great deal in school, but he was a keen student in jail.

READ learnt early to stay on-side with prison officers. He made it clear he would never use violence against them. In return, in the 1970s, many officers turned a blind eye to his involvement in a vicious power struggle between two groups of prisoners in Pentridge.

The so-called ‘overcoat war’ was a five-year battle between prisoners, resulting in at least 100 attacks from 1975. It began over allegations that Read stole 60 sausages for Christmas dinner in Pentridge’s notorious H Division. ‘Harsh words were spoken and blood enemies were made,’ Read said later. Read’s group was called the ‘overcoat gang’ because they wore long coats, even in summer, to conceal their weapons.

It was not only Read’s willingness and ability to inflict pain but his tolerance of it – and his absolute indifference to the consequences of his actions – that made him feared by other inmates.

He seemed to have no fear. Merely to fulfil a bet that he could get out of H Division and into the prison hospital, he had his ears cut off by another inmate. Again, at his own request, he had his back slashed repeatedly with a razor during a prison riot.

He was eventually stabbed by another prisoner in a surprise attack and, in a bizarre display of ‘warrior etiquette’, actually complimented his attacker on his guile before collapsing, almost dead. He underwent emergency surgery, but lost part of his bowel and intestine.

The next morning a horrified nurse found him doing pushups to prove that he was not cowed, with the result that the stitches in his stomach split.

Read’s adult life on the outside was characterised by manic bursts of violence followed by his arrest and return to jail. In early 1978, after a few months freedom, he tried to kidnap a County Court Judge to hold as a hostage until his best friend, Jimmy Loughnan, was released from prison.

A policeman in the court said that when Read produced a sawn-off shotgun and held it at the judge’s neck, all the barristers hid under the bar table, the accused jumped in front of the jury to protect them and the judge yelled: ‘Get this . … off me’, using a well-known four-letter word.

Read was sentenced to 13 years for the kidnap attempt and was later stabbed by Loughnan in jail.

WHEN he was released in 1986, Read embarked on a campaign of terror against leading criminal figures: he demanded protection money from drug dealers, and became an underworld ‘headhunter’ who preyed on criminals, extorting a cut of their wealth. ‘They were weak-gutted mice,’ was his explanation.

Read has been portrayed as a real-life vigilante, a man who hates drug dealers, sex offenders and other low-caste members of the brutal underworld hierarchy. But he rejects any illusion of nobility being associated with his violence. To him, he says, it was business.

‘Why would I rob a normal person? How much would they have in their pockets? A few dollars – and they would squeal to the law. A drug dealer can’t complain and he carries thousands.’

He set up a base in Tasmania, returning regularly to Melbourne to conduct lightning raids on criminals. He stabbed, bashed and shot drug dealers, burnt down the house of a major heroin seller, and ran riot.

At the same time he was regularly talking to members of the armed robbery squad, giving them titbits of information on criminals he wanted out of the way. He regularly met Inspector Rod Porter at the Fawkner Club Hotel in South Yarra. The trendy crowd in the pub didn’t seem to mind the heavily tattooed man with no ears.

‘We were working on a particular criminal and wanted information from Read,’ Inspector Porter said, years later. ‘He said he had a jumping jack land-mine and offered to place it in the crook’s back yard to murder him. He didn’t seem to understand that wasn’t the way we worked.’

Police received information that several criminal syndicates, tired of being raided by Read, had offered a $50,000 contract on his life. ‘There is no doubt if he had kept going, he would have been killed,’ Inspector Porter said.

Read persuaded detectives to give him a bullet-proof vest for protection. He was wearing it early the next morning when he killed a criminal, Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam, in a Melbourne nightclub car park.

Even though it appeared a clear cut murder case, Read argued in court that he had acted in self defence. He was acquitted. ‘Thank God for juries,’ he said later.

He returned to prison in 1987, and in 1991 began to write hundreds of letters about his life, which were published in his first book,
Chopper: From the Inside.
He was released later that year and moved to Tasmania, vowing he was finished with crime.

WITHIN a few months of release Read was a bizarre celebrity. He appeared on television around Australia and in the United States. Excerpts from his book were printed in Britain, New Zealand and South Africa. But, after six months, he was back inside, this time accused of attempting to kill a Tasmanian criminal connected with the drug scene in 1992.

Read’s attempt to beat the charges were novel. He argued in court that as a professional gunman, had he shot the man the victim would not have survived. It was an insult to his ability to suggest that he was involved, he said.

This allowed the prosecution to bring in his prior history, including reading sections of his book to the jury, in which he tells stories of using a blow torch to torture drug dealers. The allegations in the book were matters over which he had never been charged or convicted.

The first jury failed to reach a verdict. He was convicted at his second trial, declared a dangerous criminal and given an indefinite sentence in 1992. He continued writing inside prison, smuggling out letters. Virtually all his royalties from the four books have been spent on legal fees.

In September 1995 the Supreme Court of Tasmania lifted the indefinite sentence and he was given a six-year term which, according to Read’s lawyers, should have made him eligible for parole late in 1995.

But the Tasmanian Attorney-General, Ron Cornish, disagrees. He believes Read should serve his full term, giving him a release date of 1998.

READ has received hundreds of letters from women around Australia. Many have included naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves. Others have written claiming to be victims of sex crimes and applauding Read for bashing sex-offenders.

Mary Ann Hodge was in London on holiday when she first heard of Read. She was reading his first book when she got into a light-hearted argument with a group of Australians in a bar as to whether the criminal-author had any redeeming features.

‘I decided to write to him when I got home and find out for myself,’ the well-spoken, former private schoolgirl said later.

Ms Hodge began to visit Read and, in April 1995, they were married in Risdon Prison. The best man was Read’s barrister, Michael Hodgman, QC, a former Fraser Government cabinet minister.

‘I know that Mark is really a gentle man. I know that when he is released he will not break the law again,’ the new Mrs Read said after the wedding. She said Read’s books had given a false impression of her husband, and that he had given up crime. She said the couple hoped to buy a small cottage in Tasmania where Read could continue to write. ‘We want to get on with our lives together,’ she said.

READ has been able to turn himself into a popular and marketable public figure while in custody in Victoria and Tasmania. He has written his manuscripts in his cell at night in his primitive handwriting, using the light from a television to illuminate the prison paper.

His book distributor, Gary Allen, said Read was had become one of Australia’s most successful authors of the 1990s. ‘He has sold nearly 200,000 when anything over 10,000 is considered a very good seller. There has been nothing like
Chopper
in the market,’ he said.

Criminologist, Professor Paul Wilson, once wrote of Read’s first book: ‘Nasty, vile, bloodthirsty and thoroughly revolting this book may be. But it is hard to put down. You will, however, feel the need to wash your hands after you have read it.’

Read has enrolled in public speaking course and joined a debating club inside Risdon.

A national manager of one of Australia’s best known public speaking agents said Read could have a future on the talk circuit if he chose to do so. ‘Mr Read is not the sort of speaker that we would handle as he would not suit our clientele, but assuming he had the talent there would be a specific market for him. He would probably be able to charge between $1000 and $1500 for a keynote speech.’

He has recently taken a creative writing course in jail and has met several well-known crime writers. He has also been accepted as a member of the Australian Society of Authors. He remains unimpressed. ‘Most writers and authors,’ he writes, ‘are bleeding hearts, greenies, commies, academic space cadets, alcoholic or junkie poofters from old money families. They are the flotsam and jetsam of the anti-this and anti-that movement. I am a criminal and a heterosexual, I just don’t fit in. Ha ha.’

He added, tongue in cheek, that some of the authors who had visited him the jail may have been seeking his advice, rather than the other way around.

‘I am growing to distrust these literary scallywags. I’ve learnt nothing from any of them. In fact, I feel it is the other way around. I am going to watch what I say to these word thieves.’

He remains determined to continue writing, even though jail authorities have banned him from writing any more stories about his involvement in the underworld. He has now turned to writing fiction, inspired by three decades of real-life violence and gunplay. As he said: ‘All this stuff comes out of my head, even though I may be off it.’

His writing is crude, but tough, raw, and funny, and it has the ring of authenticity.

The most frequently-asked question about Read is: ‘Are all the stories in the books true?’ He has always maintained they are based on his life. But, characteristically, he adds that he has one favourite modern author: Helen Demidenko.