Chopper Read has killed again.
The capacity crowd in Sydney’s Enmore Theatre is hooting its admiration for Australia’s most notorious thug working his latest incarnation as stand-up comedian. “I never hurt a woman, a child or an innocent person. The only people I hurt were people who came into my world, set up business in my world and didn’t want to pay the . . . rent,” he says. “But just ’cause we shot ’em didn’t mean we didn’t like ’em; we had the decency to dump ’em off at the hospital. If you’re gonna get shot, let it be by someone with a little heart.”
An extortionist, brothel burglar, drug dealer roller, prison gang enforcer and hit man, Mark Brandon Read, 48, has left the criminal world behind in favor of a more lucrative life as best-selling author and star of the touring “Wild Colonial Psychos” scatological sideshow regaling audiences with chilling autobiographical tales delivered with an icier wit: “When you’ve pulled out a bloke’s colostomy bag, then it’s time for a kick right up the clacker.”
“Posh people love gangsters,” he says. “I was never the biggest, the toughest, the strongest. I was never the best street fighter. I was never the best at anything. All I had was imagination and a determination.”
And a gift for storytelling, according to John Silvester, a veteran crime reporter for Melbourne’s The Age. Silvester followed Read’s colorful capers throughout the 1970s and ’80s but was unamused, writing a blistering expose of Read in 1990. “I wanted to depict how he was violent, manipulative and concealed his murderous past,” Silvester says.
Shortly after, he received a Christmas card from the then-incarcerated Read stating, “My idea of a nice Christmas present would be a thousand-room hotel with a dead reporter behind every door.” Uncowed, Silvester wrote back, “Bet you wouldn’t say that to my face.” Read’s reply: “Come and see me.”
“So we talked,” he remembers, “and he was clearly one of the most fascinating, charismatic people I’d ever met.”
Silvester wrote about the encounter, including Read’s braggadocio about all the crimes he’d gotten away with. He recalls the wowed reaction from seen-it-all types around the paper, the typesetters and pressmen who pulled him aside with compliments.
The parole board didn’t see the claims the same way and padded Chopper’s sentence with another six months; small change for an outlaw doing a life sentence on the installment plan, 23 years on and off between 1971 and 1998.
Silvester says Read gloated about how, upon release, he was planning to chug bourbon and spew stories about his days as a “toe-cutter” (a thug who preys upon other underworld figures) into a tape recorder for Silvester to transform into a book. Fat chance, said Silvester. “Start writing, I told him.”
By the light of his cell’s black-and-white television, Read posted between one and nine letters a day to Silvester, totaling 300 missives, verging on the illiterate but “extremely black, extraordinarily funny,” recalls Silvester, comparing the work to Damon Runyon’s run-ins with New York’s hoodlums.
Enlisting fellow crime journalist Andrew Rule, Silvester began putting letters into thematic piles and compiling what would become “Chopper: From the Inside,” issued in 1991 (coinciding with Read’s release; he was back in jail soon thereafter) by Rule and Silvester’s vanity press, Sly Ink.
Immediate success
A first pressing of 3,000 units filled with exploits featuring unorthodox uses of blowtorches, pliers and ice picks, amid characters named Mad Dog Cox, Cowboy Johnny and Ita Buttrose, flew off bookstore shelves, forcing a reprint within two weeks, then again and again.The vicarious thrills steeped in his meandering tales of twisted Australian mateship proved irresistible.
Case in point, during a brief prison reprieve in 1978, Read held a judge at gunpoint, demanding the release of his friend, Jimmy Loughnan. The doomed attempt landed Read back in the clink for a 13-year sentence, during which time Loughnan repaid the gesture by stabbing Read when he thought Chopper had gone too far in a cellblock gang war. Writing about their reunion five years after the incident, “I walked up and kissed him on the cheek and said: `Don’t worry, Jimmy, I’m not going to hurt you. Your own life will destroy you.’ He said: `Yeah, I know it will.’ As I walked away he called out to me, `It wasn’t personal, Chopper.’ I kept walking and didn’t turn back. Why didn’t I kick him into a bleeding jelly? He was my brother. I didn’t hate him; he just broke my heart.”
While flitting in and out of jail, Read continued writing and feeding a growing fan base a total of 11 tomes — six pulpy volumes of memoirs and philosophical musings, four novelistic takes on the same material, and a children’s book, “Hooky the Cripple: The Grim Tale of a Hunchback Who Triumphs.” Silvester estimates worldwide sales of 500,000 books; Read puts the figure at 750,000. Not surprising from an author who writes, “The truth is always smaller than the story, but people love legends,” and cites “The Great Pretender” as a favorite song.
A murderer with ethics
Meeting recently outside his local pub, the Leinster Arms Hotel, on a sunny Melbourne afternoon, Read was tanned, tatted up with more than 200 jailhouse inkings, and eager to affirm his reputation as a murderer with ethics, his eyes constantly surveying passersby as he talked. “I’ve killed a few child molesters,” he says, proceeding with a tale about how his prison gang killed one pedophile by slashing his throat “right across here” as he reaches across my neck with a not-soft swipe of his index finger. “And he just bled to death in the yard,” he says, casually. “He had a sexual fetish for children, and he had to go.”
This vigilante justice meted out at his exacting pleasure is key to his fame Down Under. “I’ve done a few things they agreed with,” he says. “And the public, while horrified, are all there roaring their bloody heads off”: They’re transfixed by his ease, whether relating an anecdote about removing and swallowing an enemy’s eyeball in a glass of beer or quoting Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway or Winston Churchill. Or both, in the same breath.
“Mark is a lot smarter and more perceptive than [the “Chopper” persona he has created],” says Adam Cullen, an award-winning painter and illustrator of Read’s children’s book, crediting the success of their collaboration to compatibility.
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“We see the human race in the same way: with a mixture of suspicion and pity. You have to remember, Australia got all the criminals; America got all the Puritans. We don’t like authority.”
Not a good criminal
The allure lies in Read’s lack of contrition. “He wasn’t a very good criminal; he didn’t get away with most of it,” Cullen says. “But he didn’t care if he was caught. That’s important if you’re a cultural producer to have that ethos of consequences be damned.”
Government authorities, however, didn’t warm to the ribald literary renegade. As Read’s cultural clout grew through the ’90s, culminating in 2000’s independent biopic “Chopper,” starring the then-unknown Eric “The Hulk” Bana, bureaucrats tossed their feathers at the thought of a convict reforming and cashing in on his remembrances.
There was talk of seizing his increasing assets. But Read sought to beat the punch, donating his movie royalties to a children’s hospital. (He tells audiences the figure was $300,000; a Royal Children’s Hospital spokeswoman says it was $13,430.)
Read sees his critics as hypocrites. “They get to a tricky stage when they preach rehabilitation. A guy learns to read and write while in jail and proceeds to write a best seller. That is rehabilitation. But they have a small problem with this,” he says, laughing. “What is a guy in jail gonna write about? Flowers? Butterflies? What’s Chopper Read gonna write about? Crime.”
Which was fine with the 200 aficionados gathered recently at a working-class Melbourne club for a “Wild Psychos” warm-up gig. To-be-auctioned Chopper memorabilia littered the stage: brag collages of “Sam-the-Turk’s” murder crime-scene photos (Read escaped conviction with a self-defense argument), signed meat cleavers engraved “Never Plead Guilty”, and a framed celebrity snapshot of Read with Anthony Kiedis tagged “Put a Red Hot Chili Pepper Up Yar.”
“He’s like our Robin Hood,” one admirer said. “He likes a beer, he hates bad guys; he’s the typical Aussie guy that most Aussie guys would like to be.”
During the encore, genuflecting fans pop up throughout the 1,500-seat auditorium. A teenage boy strips the shirt from his back, silently offering it to Read; a grandmother gives a teddy bear; nubile blonds inquire about getting their DVDs autographed.
One wonders if the devotees have taken note of Read’s missing earlobes, sliced off by a pal at his request to gain an infirmary pass from the Dickens-horror H Division Pentridge penitentiary; or of his weathered new bride, Margaret, a childhood sweetheart expecting their first baby at 42, not withstanding the ex-wife and son he must support in Tasmania; or of the shaky stutter evinced in caught-off-guard moments, perhaps a remnant of that claw hammer in the head; or of the creeping shadow of dread of a man who must enthusiastically recycle the same dirty deeds but would prefer to be pursuing his new passion: painting.
“I’m a freak. The reason people come to see me is I’m a curiosity in as much as I’m alive and I shouldn’t be. I don’t want anyone following the path I lead,” he says from the Enmore stage. “People get a laugh, but I wouldn’t wish it on a three-legged dog.”