Mark Chopper Read is dying
He is Australia's best-known crime figure turned author, turned legend. The man with one name, Chopper, is dying. John Silvester remembers a singular relationship and an unusual friend. 'Chopper' Read losing battle with cancer
Notorious crime figure Mark "Chopper" Read, said to be in the final stages of liver cancer, was admitted to hospital on Monday.
First a confession. This reporter and the subject of this story successfully conspired together to commit one of the crimes of the century. The offence of which we speak may not be specifically addressed by either common law or statute, but it is enough to turn left-wing academics, stern-faced novelists and right-wing tub-thumpers orange with outrage.
It is a series of little books on the life of one Mark Brandon Read, rightly considered to be the greatest crime committed against literature in the history of the written word.
Contrary to popular opinion, Read is no underworld mastermind and his criminal history is littered with blunders. His police record shows that when he broke the law he was usually caught and convicted. Between the ages of 20 and 38 he spent just 13 months outside prison - hardly the CV of a top crook.
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2013/10/397.jpg Chopper Read has terminal cancer and this week was admitted to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Photo: Jon Reid
While he was just a loose cannon on the outside, Read was a powerful force inside prison when he was leading the ''Overcoat Gang'' - a group of inmates who wore coats to conceal an impressive array of home-made weapons.
It was while serving one of these long jail stints he learnt that writing sentences beat the hell out of serving them. For it is as storyteller that Chopper Read, 58, will be remembered and with good reason. Long before Underbelly he knew solid citizens were fascinated by the dark side, or as he said, ''Posh people love gangsters.''
For years, Read was available to any reporter looking for a quick one-liner on matters of crime, which meant the underworld headhunter was hunted for a headline. And that, at least initially, was Read's motivation. He always wanted to be remembered - and he has got his wish.
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Not your average friend: Words from a Christmas card (below) that Chopper sent to John Silvester in 1990.
His tattoos have faded, the quick gangster gait replaced by a shuffle and bourbon with prescription medication, but the hard edge has remained. Diagnosed with terminal cancer last year, he refused to dwell on his demise. As a crook he showed no compassion and as a dying man no self-pity.
He wondered aloud whether being hit on the head so often (prison batons, iron bars and an icepick, among the weapons of choice) had destroyed the part of the brain that generates stress.
''I know they have told me I am supposed to be dying, but I just don't worry about it,'' he said.
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The fact he has made it this far is a miracle in itself. He had been stabbed, shot, bashed and lived for years with a contract on his battered head. In recent years he was delighted to tell anyone who bought a ticket to his show that he outlasted his enemies.
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The early days: Chopper Read is led to a police divvy van.
Back in 1990, this reporter wrote a double-page article in the Herald Sun calling him all sorts of nasty names after he was acquitted of the 1987 killing of Siam ''Sammy the Turk'' Ozerkam outside St Kilda's Bojangles nightclub.
Police said it was a cold-blooded murder when Read pulled out a baby .410 shotgun and blasted the drug dealer in the face. Read called it ''a clear-cut case of self-defence''. In the end the jury sided with Read. It was one of his few court victories.
Some time after the article was published Read sent me a Christmas card (which was surprising because it was nowhere near Christmas).
It said, in part, ''My idea of a perfect Christmas would be to own a thousand-room hotel and find a member of the Herald Sun dead in every room. May the Yuletide log fall from your fireplace and burn your house down. Seasons greetings and jingle bells. Chopper Read.''
In those days reporters could actually visit inmates and, intrigued by the card, I went inside Pentridge's notorious H Division to interview him.
Unlike most crooks, he didn't make excuses, didn't claim he had been railroaded and didn't blame his childhood. In fact, he said the article just scratched the surface, and spent the next 90 minutes bragging about the crimes he had committed.
This resulted in another major story that made Read happy, but the parole board cross because it showed the man they were about to release believed remorse was an electronic code used by the military.
The result? An extra six months in jail. (Read once wrote a long submission to authorities listing the reasons why he had reformed and should be released. He perhaps defeated his own argument with his last line: ''I suppose a bribe is out of the question?'')
It was then Read wrote to me again, suggesting his story was a natural blockbuster. With little enthusiasm, I suggested he write down some thoughts, and he responded with hundreds of letters that were bleak, black and funny.
With fellow crime reporter Andrew Rule we cobbled the letters and anything else we could find into a little book called Chopper: From the Inside, which was self-published in 1991 because no publisher would touch it. (The first edition fell apart because we didn't use enough glue.)
Peter Corris, the internationally respected crime fiction writer, accurately observed that Read's first book was ''badly written, cliched, chaotically organised and partly bogus''. It also became a bestseller and 10 more followed.
Acclaimed US crime writer Elmore Leonard became a fan, describing Read as ''a living legend … he's vicious, he's a brute''.
There is no doubt some of Read's stories are embellished, polished or, in some cases, stolen, but there is also no doubt that through the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the most dangerous men in Australia.
Some of his fans saw him as a vigilante who handed out rough justice to opportunistic drug dealers - a sort of no-eared Dirty Harry.
Read himself was less romantic. When I asked him why he specialised in attacking gangsters, he answered the question with a question.
''How much money you got in your pocket?'' The answer was about $20. ''So I could steal your 20 bucks and your secondhand Commodore and you'd go to the cops. Or I can torture a drug dealer and he'll hand over six grand and never say a word. You do the maths.''
So who was the real Chopper Read?
Dangerous gangsters feared Read because he was a local version of an underworld terrorist. For years he saw himself as a street soldier who didn't care if he lived or died. His ability to inflict and absorb physical punishment was legendary. He allowed another inmate to cut off his ears, commenting that once detached they jumped around like ''Mexican jumping beans''.
Read has always been a strange combination of gangster cunning and Boy Scout loyalty. In 1978, armed with a shotgun, he tried to abduct County Court Judge Bill Martin in a doomed attempt to free mate Jimmy Loughnan from prison.
Read, who was sentenced to 13 years for the attempted abduction, wrote to Judge Martin to apologise, and the judge wrote back to say he knew it wasn't personal. Loughnan repaid Read for his efforts by stabbing him in a premeditated jail attack. ''I should have broken his neck, the treacherous bastard,'' Read would say later.
For a ruthless gunman Read always had a touching sense of loyalty. Once, when given tickets to a Barry Michael boxing event, I invited Chopper as a guest. We sat together although he looked uncomfortable and rarely concentrated on the action in the ring.
A few days later when I asked why he seemed so distracted he said, ''You've never invited me anywhere, so I just thought you were in trouble and needed back-up.''
While many high-profile crooks feared Read the stand-over man, they hated Read the author. For he did something they could never forgive: he laughed at them.
When Cherub Pictures bought the rights to his story he told producers that Eric Bana, then a little-known comedian, should play the lead. Years later Bana tested for the role and proved a natural. The actor met the gangster in a Hobart pub and quickly picked up Read's mannerisms. After the film was released, Chopper commented, ''The trouble is, Bana does a better Chopper Read than I do.''
Before the movie was to go into production, Read, influenced by prescription medication and free booze in the ABC green room, went on the short-lived Elle McFeast Live program as a guest. It was a disaster, so much so the Commonwealth government threatened to pull all federal film funding if Chopper received a chop out.
Then the stand-over man did something many who don't know him would say was out of character - he donated his share to the Royal Children's Hospital via the police-backed Bluey Day Foundation.
''Karma,'' he said, as if trying to right a few wrongs. Not that he missed out. Book sales spiked, which provided a steady revenue stream.
For a bloke who tortured drug dealers for cash, Read was never much into money. ''Before I die I just want my story told,'' he would say.
Certainly in the beginning he was motivated by fame, remarking that it wasn't the fastest gunslingers in the Wild West who were remembered, but the ones who ''palled up with the drunken journos from the penny dreadfuls''.
Well, if fame was the aim, he has succeeded, with few able to differentiate between the reality and the legend.
In the Northern Territory he was once asked for an autograph and obliged with his normal Mark ''Chopper'' Read. The crestfallen fan then asked, ''Could you sign it with your real name, Eric Bana?'' Which he did. So his last known crime was forging the signature of a Hollywood star.
The truth is, Read had been playing Chopper for years, giving speeches, selling memorabilia and painting pictures. At one gallery opening night he walked over and said to me, ''Hey, what I'm doing here is not illegal, but it's certainly criminal.''
When the underworld war was in full running he was offered a couple of comeback murder contracts. ''I could have done it, but I would have been caught. I couldn't do jail time any more.''
One of his peers - an equally dangerous man - decided to jump back in and took three murder contracts. He is now inside, a broken man destined to die in jail.
In more serious moments Chopper says he can hardly remember the violent psychopath he once was. Back then he was so dangerous because he had nothing to lose.
Now that has changed. Having married the blood-loyal Margaret Cassar, whom he has known since they were teenagers, he craved a version of a normal life.
At his 50th birthday in a Collingwood pub he said he had one wish: ''To live long enough to see my sons grow up'' (Charlie, from his first marriage, and Roy, from his second).
But he could never really lose the old Chopper - his whole franchise is based on what he was, not what he is. In his first book he wrote, ''I regret nothing.''
Yet he once confided away from the autograph hunters, the pretend tough guys, the fake friends, the gold-diggers and the backslappers, ''That's bullshit. Most of it was just a waste.''
Those who want to bang on about Read's criminal history forget one thing. He is a career criminal who has not committed a crime for 20 years and who dragged himself out of the madness that was H Division.
It is a bizarre story of redemption rather than recidivism.
Mark recently issued Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal proceedings against Andrew Rule and myself alleging he was ripped off during the 20 years since we met in H Division (a claim denied).
But when I rang him it was the same old Mark, with both of us sensing this might be our last conversation. The man who had done so much time knew his was running out.
We talked of his life, his health and his very limited future.
As always he was generous and warm, declaring the best story of the lot was how a reporter with little hair and a crook with less teeth teamed up to commit grievous bodily harm on the English language.
And got away with it.
An earlier version of this story was published in John Silvester's Saturday column last November when he first learned Mark Read was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
