Inside Uncle Chop-Chop’s world

Mark 'Chopper' Read talks candidly about his battle with liver cancer.

THESE book extracts from Adam Shand's new book The Real Chopper reveal who Mark 'Chopper' Read was — a rogue and villain who has captivated Australia for years.

EXTRACT ONE: 'Uncle Chop-Chop' gave us what we wanted

Mark Read was a rogue, but he never enjoyed enough success to be a real villain for the public. So he invented it.

His 'victims' were other social outcasts, faceless drug dealers, paedophiles and crooks that the

world was better off without. 'Uncle Chop-Chop' became a superhero for his times, a damaged individual capable of terrible and gratuitous violence, yet with a perverse social conscience. He had convinced us that he did it all for us.

He had rid the world of the criminal scum like drug dealers and kiddie fiddlers. He gave us what we wanted.

At the same time, Read symbolised the failings that make us human. Sloth, lust, greed, dishonesty, it was all in there and more, but we forgave him because of the zest for life he embodied. The more the moral guardians decried him, the more the punters loved him, even though he lied his head off to them at every turn.

Now he risked his legacy with a television interview on 60 Minutes.

Gone but not forgotten ... Chopper Read was known as 'Uncle Chop-Chop.' Source: Supplied

He would confess that beyond the cartoon violence he had conjured up in his books there were real victims.

Read was just three weeks from death but he remained in control of the script. The performance artist had turned his life into a tragic comedy that he would script right to the final curtain. He earnestly declared that he would confess to four murders, no more, no less.

He went through them without emotion, almost casually.

As he spoke, he folded a piece of tissue paper tightly around a cigarette lighter, then unwrapped it and started folding and unfolding it over and over again. The hands were soft and smooth, appearing years younger than the rest of him. They were the hands of a callous killer, he would have had us believe.

There was no hard evidence linking Read to these killings (except for 'Sammy the Turk' Mehmet Ozerkam), nothing more than his say-so, or he would have been arrested long ago. The confession was something of an anticlimax.

Mad and bad ... Chopper Read had his ears cut off by another prisoner in 1978 to get out of H Division. It was a short-lived victory. There was nowhere else to put Pentridge's most hated inmate until Jika Jika opened in 1980. Source: Supplied

Except for Sidney Michael Collins, the victims were not new to the readers of his 294 the real chopper the last picture show 295 books. It was deflating to think we were privy to secrets with such little potency. To accentuate the farce, a cleaner interrupted Read in mid-confession so he could clear the rubbish away.

The confession was less of a surprise than the denials. After years of talking up his violent escapades, Read began to deny most of them one by one. He had never chopped anyone's toes off with a set of boltcutters, nor had he ever applied a blowtorch to anyone's feet. That had all been borrowed from the legend of Linus Patrick 'Jimmy the Pom' Driscoll. It was all made up and he was now trapped in his lies, trapped in his creation, Chopper Read.

EXTRACT TWO: Behind bars with Mark 'Chopper' Read

Without a work routine, Mark Read, Ted Eastwood and Alex Tsakmakis would wander in and out of their cells all day. The plus to being in Jika Jika was that inmates could have contact visits, unheard of in H Division then.

Not that he was getting many visitors; only his father Keith regularly came. Jeff would have come but he assumed that Read was still dirty on him for sleeping with his girlfriend Cindy. Just to make sure, Jeff sent him a cheeky Christmas card a year earlier.

Got a joint in one hand, a stubby in the other, just had a line and

I'm halfway through a root. Have a great Christmas C**t!

P.S. Sorry about your girlfriend.

If this was a gesture of conciliation, Read ignored it, but he did stick the card to his wall for a month.

He threw away piles of mail from nutters and idiots who wanted to be his friend, but Jeff's card had pride of place.

Apart from Keith, there was just a busty, toothless woman from Richmond who came to see Read. And this was strictly a practical affair for him. The visiting room had couches and tables and afforded a surprising level of privacy.

In June, the woman had been seen passing Read some tablets, which he had swallowed, claiming they were only his 'Pluravit' tablets. Then he lost his visitors' rights after being caught getting a blow job from her.

Ned Kelly 2.0. ... Mark Read's ambition was to become Australia's best-known criminal. He accomplished that, not with a gun, but with a pen. Few seemed to care whether he was telling the truth or not. Source: Supplied

After the blow job incident, she was banned from seeing Read, leaving just Keith on the list. The trouble with Keith was he took on Read's rivalries and hatreds as his own. He became obsessed with what Read's enemies might be up to on the outside, and that dominated his conversations.

He had spurred his son on in the battles of H Division, becoming immersed in the tactics and the personalities, but in Jika Jika Read's war was over. He couldn't get to anyone, let alone kill them.

After some months of this, Read wrote to the governor requesting that his Richmond beauty be allowed to visit him once more. The letter was a masterpiece of civility and remorse.

Permission for contact visits with myself and [the woman] was cancelled several months ago as a result of behaviour unbecoming an officer and a gentleman — so to speak.

I have sence mended my ways. I am now a totally reformed character. The door on the lounge is now a see through glass door — thus making imprudent behavour impossible.

I would like to recontinue my contact visits with [her] as ... she is the only one that bothers to visit. I would like to offer my heartfelt apology for my utterly deplorable conduct — and promise — that if I will be given a second chance I will behave myself like a Prisoner of Jika Jika

would be expected to behave at all times.

Thank you very much indeed

Mark Brandon Read

The jocular reply came back from the governor.

Please inform 'Officer and Gentleman' Read that I reviewed his previous deplorable conduct, but feel that sufficient time has passed to once again grant him contact visits with [the woman]. However, if he violates the trust placed in him, it will be a Cold Cold day in hell before another such request is honoured.

A man was more likely to die of boredom in Jika Jika than from some bloody misadventure, but that didn't stop Read looking for trouble. He couldn't control his moods and the familiar paranoia and violence were always simmering within him.

And spending all of his time with just two others wasn't helping either. Read was a social

creature and needed the company of others, even if he tormented them non-stop. He always expected his friends to reject him, and so inside Battlestar Galactica he was hyper-vigilant.

A few months in, Read started to get edgy about his relations with Eastwood. He couldn't work out why he refused to walk with him and Tsakmakis in the exercise yard. He assumed that he must have somehow offended the kidnapper and he was deliberately avoiding him. One day he exploded in a rage at Eastwood, as if trying to bring this imagined slight to a head.

But Eastwood wasn't about to fight Read; he just found his company tedious and his moods unpredictable. He asked to be moved out of the unit and was replaced by another inmate, Mick Windsor.

Caught ... Mark 'Chopper' Read is led from Russell Street Police Headquarters to the City Watchhouse after being charged with seven offences following his attempt to kidnap a judge at the County Court in Melbourne, Victoria. Picture: News Corp Australia Source: Supplied

Not long after, a fight broke out between Tsakmakis and Windsor. Read stepped in to help and Windsor ended up with a badly broken arm but somehow the trio remained together. But it was only a matter of time before Read and Tsakmakis fell out.

On 7 January 1981, the moment came. According to Read, Tsakmakis was allowed to use a pair of tailor's shears as part of the sewing work he was doing in the day room. Read feared that the ultimate destination of those shears would be in his back, so he decided to get in first.

His cellmate was sitting reading a newspaper in the day room before beginning his tailoring duties, which consisted of removing the white stripes from old pairs of H Division jeans. Without warning, Read grabbed the scissors and plunged them repeatedly into Tsakmakis's neck. Streaming blood, Tsakmakis fled to the showers, with Read in hot pursuit.

He might have killed him had the screws not intervened. A voice came over the intercom telling Read to drop the scissors and return to the day room, but Read hung onto them until Tsakmakis was moved out.

He was allowed back into the day room, where he found a puddle of his cellmate's blood. He dipped his finger into it and traced the words 'Sorry Alex' on Tsakmakis's door.

The altercation might have brought most relationships to an end, but this was Jika Jika. Read wrote to the governor apologising for stabbing Tsakmakis and asking for him to be returned to his unit.

Criminal figure turned artist ... Mark Chopper Read in front of paintings he produced. Picture: News Corp Australia Source: News Corp Australia

He explained that he had been depressed and frustrated at the time, after a visit from his father. He had discovered that he had been let down by a newspaper journalist who for the past year had claimed to be writing a book about him.

His father had also told him he planned to move to Tasmania, leaving him alone in Victoria.

Poor Alex had borne the brunt of his disappointment, he said.

However, the following day Read wrote another letter saying he was the victim of a conspiracy. The governor had wanted Read to murder Tsakmakis: 'what govoners do is play chess useing myself and others as chess men. King takes Queen and the Govoner stays cleen,' he wrote.

Ever since I have been in Jail I have let everyone know that I Mark Brandon Read have a Ku Klux Klan outlook toward Coons and Wogs − yet I was put into the same yard as Prisoner

Alex Tsakmakis without being told beforehand − I believe this to have been a set up − knowing that one way or another either Tsakmakis or myself would be carried out in a bag − as it stood

I got in first from behind and Tskamakis was the victom and not me − it was an out and out set up hopeing that one of us wouild finnish of the other − one dead and the other gets a life

sentence − two birds with one stone. The only thing keeping me alive is my quick wittedness and extream treachery.

Remarkably enough, they returned Alex to his yard and there were no further incidents between them.

Read's biggest problem was that he was bored stiff, he told authorities. He was doing fourteen years jail for a man who had betrayed and almost killed him. His life was entirely hopeless, he

believed. To pass time, he even wrote to the Federal Defence Minister Jim Killen, suggesting he set up a 'punishment battalion' consisting of long-serving prisoners who could be transformed into an elite commando force.

Like many of his ideas, this was lifted from a film: The Dirty Dozen.

Shortly after stabbing Tsakmakis, it was self-mutilation time again. Read had wanted to go to the dentist but the screws wouldn't take him, he explained later. So to get their attention, he had repeatedly smashed his mouth on a tap in the exercise yard. He demolished most of the teeth on the right side of his jaw and got to see the dentist.

The prison dentist extracted eleven teeth, three from the bottom rear and eight from the top. Read wrote later that the 'Prince of Pain' had dug them out 'like a Welsh coal miner'.

He was happy with the result, though, telling inmates that he looked meaner and crazier with no teeth. And that was his aim. In a confined space like jail, what people feared most was a lunatic.

A chilling account of people on the Pentridge tour who have seen the ghost of Chopper Read outside

EXTRACT THREE: How 'Chopper' get mixed-up in the world of drugs

It was 2006 when Mark Dixon first saw Chopper do drugs. They were on tour, in a hotel room in south-side Brisbane. He just pulled out a bag of speed and a fit and banged it into his arm. Dixon was shocked because he had totally believed in Read's propaganda. The whole anti-drugs image came crashing down that moment. He told Dixon that he was weary of hiding it from him, that he had been on drugs since about 1984 when he was in Geelong Jail. He would take anything he could get his hands on, from cannabis to heroin, but speed had been his drug of choice. Amphetamines had the opposite effect on him than for most people. It was just like the scene with 'Tanya' the prostitute in Chopper: he would put a needle in his arm and he would pass out almost instantly. If he had been drinking, it was different; he would vomit then pass out. Dixon couldn't hold it against him. With the 'shit of a life' that Read had endured, he would not deny him the physical escape of getting high.

Read had been incredibly generous to Dixon. He had taught him to be a public speaker and allowed him to open for him at his shows. He had helped Dixon put together a repertoire of stories, some true, some fictional. Chopper had made him famous.

The real Chopper ... Mark Read would claim that Charlie was not his son to please second wife Margaret, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. Source: Supplied

Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that someone would want the autograph of a bouncer, and by then Dixon had done loads of them. Read warned him that he was going to become addicted to fame and he was right. Read had taken him there; he had given him that. Dixon promised that his mate would always have a home at his beachfront house in the north of Brisbane.

Andrew Roper had witnessed the toll that drugs were taking on Read time and time again. In the winter of 2005, during a six-week gig at the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne, Roper feared that drugs would swallow him up. Where once speed had been his drug of choice, heroin was now increasingly on the menu. His health was already fragile. His face was drawn and grey and he would often cough up blood, but he kept going. The gig, co-hosted by a guest comedian, was 'Ask Uncle Chop-Chop', where members of the audience asked him questions and he would riff for an hour or two. It was a change from his standard performance and, despite his health, he could fire up and deliver a good performance.

One cold, rainy night, Roper had driven him home to Collingwood after the gig but he asked to be dropped off up the street. It was near midnight and he didn't want to wake Margaret up, he said.

An hour later Roper's telephone rang. It was Margaret asking where Read was; he hadn't made it home. All Roper could say was that he had dropped him off. Half an hour later, Margaret was on the phone again, demanding that Roper help her search for her husband. Roper and Margaret, with baby Roy in the back seat, scoured all the surrounding streets to no avail. Margaret was certain he would be found at a dingy boarding house on Johnson Street. It was pouring with rain but Margaret, by now frantic, jumped out of the car and began to scream at the upper windows of the dingy building.

Thank God for Margaret ... Margaret Cassar took Chooper Read back after first wife Mary-Ann kicked him out. She loved him with a deep intensity and kept him going through all his struggles with drugs and ill health. Source: Supplied

There was no response but she would not be deterred. 'Mark, I know you're in there. Come out now,' she shrieked over and over again.

Finally, a voice came from the depths: 'He's not here, now would you f**k off.' They were risking a violent confrontation and so Roper took Margaret home. The next day Read turned up in St Vincent's Hospital.

He had been found later the previous night lying unresponsive in the back lane behind the boarding house. It seemed that having extracted all the cash he had on him, his 'friends' had dumped him like a bag of rubbish. He was no longer their problem. He had overdosed on heroin and the paramedics revived him with a shot of Narcan to the heart.

It took him more than a week to recover. He was depressed and had lost all motivation. Heroin eats away at an addict's soul, no matter how tough and powerful they are. Read had survived all that jail could throw at him, but suicidal thoughts were creeping into his mind.

Roper decided it was time for a formal intervention. He got together with a Catholic priest, Father James Grant, and former Rose Tattoo frontman Angry Anderson to work out a plan. As part of Read's rehabilitation they would set up a charity, the Mark Brandon Read Foundation, to help young offenders coming out of jail deal with life. It would establish gyms like the old Try Boys' Youth Club that Read had attended in his youth and help kids deal with substance-abuse issues.

Chopper the Copper ... despite being a crook, Read had the utmost respect for authority. When he became an informer for Victoria's Armed Robbery Squad in 1986−87, they gave him a bulletproof vest. He behaved as if he was untouchable. Source: Supplied

According to Roper, Read was excited about the idea, even when it was explained that he wouldn't be paid for lending his name to the charity.

He turned to Roper and said, 'Well, I better get cleaned up then, hadn't I? If I'm going to go into the media and talk about this message then I had better get off the gear, hadn't I?'

He asked Roper how he could get clean. He had already tried to kick his heroin habit; Roper had been taking him to a pharmacy in North Carlton each morning to pick up his methadone, on Margaret's orders. At home, he would take it, but once on tour there were always plenty of contacts to give him smack and speed.

It was decided that the first step would be to check Read into a treatment facility three hours north of Melbourne. He was enthusiastic and eager to sign up and met with the counsellors, but then Margaret found out and put the kybosh on the plan.

'She gave me the biggest blast in the world. She went nuts at me. I had Father James and Angry Anderson there as she was yelling at me and I put it on speaker, and we all tried to reason with her,' Roper said in 2014. Roper knew Read was living a lie. He had heard Read preach against the evils of drugs in hundreds of his shows. He had set himself up as the protector of kids; he would only ever hurt drug dealers. Roper had heard the crowds cheer when he spoke of killing and maiming drug dealers. And it was all a facade. He felt Margaret was in denial of her husband's drug problem.

It was then that Roper doubted Read's love for his wife. The relationship for him was about security, and having a safe house that he could always fall back on. It had been the same with Mary-Ann, the two women had kept him out of prison but in effect had created a new kind of penitentiary.

First wife ... Chopper Read's 1995 marriage to Mary-Ann Hodge helped himout of an indefinite sentence in Tasmania's Risdon Prison for shooting a bikie. Source: Supplied

Others contest Roper's claims, saying Margaret accepted that Read had a problem and was determined to deal with it in her own way. Her doctor, Helen Kouzmin, introduced Margaret to a psychiatrist, Dr Bill Orchard, who believed Read had Attention Deficit Disorder Type 4.

It was the diagnosis that Read and his parents had been looking for all his life to explain his lack of consequential thinking, his poor impulse control and the aggression that had been the hallmark of his criminal career.

Dr Orchard prescribed a heavy dose of dexamphetamine, a stimulant, and Epilim, a mood stabiliser. Read claimed that he had never felt so sane in his life. Margaret had pulled him back from the brink of suicide and saved their marriage. But he continued to take drugs.

Money had become a huge issue for the Reads. In twenty-three years and nine months in jail, no-one had ever come to give inmates any lessons on finance. With his name up in lights and the money rolling in, banks had been queuing up to give him credit cards. They invited him to go to the ATM and collect the money. He was advised that he should make the first payments and they would increase his credit limit.

He was amazed that each card used to pump out 800 bucks a day. The seed of larceny in him made him wonder whether the banks realised what they were doing. He said later that he should have been locked in a cupboard when it came to handing out credit cards. He thought it was manna from heaven, free money.

He took out his $800 a day on three cards until he had racked up $20 000 debt. There was an American Express charge card too. He made a few payments early on but his spending quickly overwhelmed his income. Most of the money went up in smoke at Crown Casino, where he would play roulette until his last dollar was gone.

He used the rest of the cash to buy drugs for himself and his Collingwood mates. Or he would go down to Harrolds, a swanky men's outfitter in Collins Street, and spend up big on clothes, many of which he gave away. He settled up a debt with Roper by buying him a gold chain and a Mont Blanc pen. He also gave him a gold Rolex watch, which he later admitted was a fake, a present he had received from a porn star.

Read never bothered to pay tax on the money he had been earning on the road. The Australian Tax Office finally caught up with him, sending him a bill that Roper estimates was up to $100 000.

Family Man ... few saw the man behind the legend. He promised Margaret he would never return to crime, but illicit drugs were his escape from the tedium of being good. Source: Supplied

When the demand letters began rolling in, Read went to see a lawyer, who said his only option was to declare bankruptcy and then the whole thing would go away. The lawyer ran him through the consequences of going bankrupt: he couldn't seek credit for seven years, and he would lose any antiques or luxury electronic items and artworks to his trustee in bankruptcy. He didn't have property or flash cars to lose. It would be a fresh start. He wondered why anyone ever paid their bills when there was this escape hatch available. Why had he bothered wasting his time on stand-over?

He turned up at Andrew Roper's house with a taxi-load of stuff he wanted to put beyond the reach of his trustee. There were paintings, a samurai sword his father had given him and a pen gun that was once owned by crime matriarch Kath Pettingill.

To make matters worse, a comedian named Heath Franklin was touring the country with an increasingly popular Chopper Read parody show. It was based more on the Eric Bana Chopper, but Read felt aggrieved that Franklin was better at being Chopper than he was. In the beginning, Roper had struck a deal with Franklin's management that he would take his act only to the major comedy festivals and leave the pub and club circuit to Read. But then Roper tried to book him into the Ballarat Town Hall only to be told that 'Chopper' had performed there only last month. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people couldn't tell the difference between Franklin's parody and Read's pantomime character. Read was outraged. 'I don't look like him, I don't sound like him,' he told me at the time. 'I met him once and he's five seven tall, with a big, fat, bloated upper body. He's as weak as a chicken. I c h o ppi n g u p 272 to get the ears off." And he started blubbing in the corner. [Then] I said, "You wanna harden the f**k up,"' he said.

Franklin took those words to heart and launched a highly successful tour under the banner 'Harden the f**k up Australia'. Read had trademarked the Chopper Read name and felt he deserved at least 10 per cent. 'They get up in the morning, they feed their kids and pay their bills because a man called Chopper Read once cut his ears off twenty-odd years ago, and their whole life revolves round impersonating Chopper Read, mimicking and copying a no-eared lunatic,' he told me.

Trapped ... Chopper Read was caught between the criminal and straight worlds. He craved acceptance but knew his living after jail was built on his reputation for violence and insanity. So he gave people what they wanted. Source: Supplied

As Roper's relationship with Margaret descended into acrimony, she made Read sack him as manager at least three times. Yet soon after he would seek Roper's support and solace, privately countermanding his wife's edicts.

Managing Read had been a challenge, and not just because of Margaret. There was always a passing parade of characters who influenced Read while trying to put their hands in his pocket. Michael John Boyd had been his art dealer in 2006 and had been helping him to develop his painting style. Boyd had staged Read's fourth exhibition at a space in Collingwood, which had sold moderately well. But Boyd was also a hopeless junkie who was already serving community-based orders for stealing motor vehicles. The gallery was short-lived and Boyd was living off Read before he absconded to Queensland with a substantial sum of the Reads' money. According to Roper, Margaret was livid and put out feelers to find him. But unbeknownst to his wife,

Read was still in contact with Boyd and arranged to meet him while on tour in Queensland. The money was never mentioned. Roper got the impression that Read had used Boyd as an excuse for his own profligacy.

In March 2008, Roper got a call from Read. At first, all he heard was 'a sick maniacal laugh down the phone'.

'Mr Boyd had an accident today,' he then said ominously. 'He conveniently drove in front of a train. He won't be ripping anyone off any more.' According to witnesses, Boyd had driven around boom gates and onto a level crossing at Nunawading in Melbourne's east.

He put his hands on his head and waited for the oncoming train to end his suffering. The coroner's verdict was suicide; his medical history included depression, poly-drug abuse and hepatitis C. Yet it seemed to Roper that Read was trying to suggest that Boyd's death had been somehow orchestrated and that he had been involved.

The Ropers moved to Adelaide for business in 2009 and bid farewell to their unusual house guest. Late one evening, Roper got a call from Read. He was at their front door and wanted to know why they weren't answering their doorbell. He had forgotten they had moved and had gone to their old address in East Melbourne. One wonders what the new residents thought when they saw Chopper Read on the security camera demanding to be let in.

Buy The Real Chopper: The Man Behind the Legend Inside and Out by Adam Shand for $28.99 including delivery. Buy online at heraldsun.com.au/shop, call 1300 306 107 or post a cheque to Book Offers: P.O. Box 14730 Melbourne Vic 8001. Please allow 14 days for delivery.

The Real Chopper by Adam Shand, published by Michael Joseph. Source: Supplied

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