Chopper Read
| Mark "Chopper" Read | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Mark Brandon Read 17 November 1954 Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Died | 9 October 2013 (aged 58) Parkville, Victoria, Australia |
| Cause of death | Liver cancer |
| Other names | Chopper Read |
| Occupation | Criminal, author |
| Spouse(s) |
|
| Children | Charlie Roy Brandon |
| Conviction(s) |
Armed robbery Assault Kidnapping |
Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (17 November 1954 – 9 October 2013) was an Australian criminal and author. Read wrote a series of semi-autobiographical fictional crime novels and children's books. The 2000 film Chopper is based on his life.
Read was born on 12 November 1954 to a former army and Korean War veteran father and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. He was placed in a children's home for the first five years of his life. He grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood, Thomastown, Fitzroy and Preston. He was bullied at school, claiming that by the age of 15 he had been on the "losing end of several hundred fights" and that his father, usually on his mother's recommendation, beat him often as a child. In an interview with 60 Minutes, he was playing "Russian Roulette" with himself and later asked the news reporter if she wanted to play, and she said no. He didn't take no for an answer and pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. Luckily, there was no bullet in the chamber he shot at her. It was also revealed that Read had been molested as a child. Read was made a ward of the state by the age of 14 and was placed in several mental institutions as a teenager, where, he later claimed, he was subjected to electroshock therapy.
When he was still young, Read was already an accomplished street fighter and the leader of the Surrey Road gang. He began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers, based in massage parlours in the Prahran area. He later graduated to kidnapping and torturing members of the criminal underworld, often using a blowtorch or bolt cutters to remove the toes of his victims as an incentive for them to produce enough money so that Read would leave them alive.
Read spent only 13 months outside prison between the ages of 20 and 38, having been convicted of crimes including armed robbery, firearm offences, assault, arson, impersonating a police officer and kidnapping. While in Pentridge Prison's H division in the late 1970s, Read launched a prison war. His gang, dubbed "The Overcoat Gang" because they wore long coats all year round to conceal their weapons, were involved in several hundred acts of violence against a larger opposing gang during this period. Around this time, Read had a fellow inmate cut both of his (Read's) ears off in order to be able to leave H division temporarily. While in his early biographies Read claimed this was to avoid an ambush by other inmates, by being transferred to the mental health wing, his later works state that he did so to "win a bet". The nickname "Chopper" was given to him long before this, from a childhood cartoon character.
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