Mark Brandon Chopper Read - Chopper Unchopped

Without any disrespect to police, the NCA, and investigative journalists, they all stand on the outside straining their eyes to look inside the criminal worldThe truth is, the underworld is a cess pit, not a science.

Mark Brandon Read

WHEN, 25 years ago, the brilliant British playwright Emlyn Williams spent a year writing an account of Britains most chilling child murder case the Moors murders he was repeatedly asked why a self-respecting writer would devote himself to such a ghastly subject.

Williams tackled the question in the foreword of his subsequent masterful chronicle of murder and its detection, Beyond Belief.

My answer is a simple one, he wrote. For me, just as no physical aberration can ever be too extraordinary to interest the medical scientist, so no psychological phenomena can be forbidden to the serious and dispassionate writer, however unsavoury the details. Who expects savour from a story of evil? When a shocking scandal blows up, with all the attendant sensationalism, there is in some people an instinct to avert the head and shovel the whole thing under the carpet, I dont want to know. But some of us do want to know the proper study of mankind is Man. And Man cannot be ignored because he has become vile.

Prison is full of vile people: mostly habitual criminals, with a sprinkling of psychopaths and deviants, and not counting a few non-criminals paying the penalty for a moment of madness. For all the good intentions and rhetoric of governments, Pentridge, Long Bay, Boggo Road, Yatala and the like are not institutions of reform but keystones in the Australian underworld, an underworld which operates with the same ruthless efficiency behind bars as it does outside.

Criminals, especially in prison, have a rigid and jealously-maintained hierarchy, in which the price of upsetting the social order is usually injury or death. At the top of this brutal pyramid are the few who can instil fear in the many with their propensity for violence.

Of this few, none is better known than Mark Brandon Read, known as Chopper.

Read has been one of the most feared men in Australia for 15 years. A childhood runaway, a nightclub bouncer at 15, a street fighter at 17 and a notorious standover man at 19, he has carved a fearsome reputation for violence: not just with his hands, but with an armoury ranging from iron bars, knives and tomahawks to pistols, sawn-off shotguns and high-powered military weapons.

Read is hated by many in the underworld, even those Mr Bigs whose vast criminal wealth can buy the best protection. For Read is what the underworld calls a head-hunter a lone wolf who plunders other criminals of the money they make from drug trafficking, gambling, vice or armed robbery.

And for all his efforts to invest his actions with some sort of vigilante justness, it is a sickening business. Headhunters use torture to discover what they want to know. Favourite methods include cutting off toes with boltcutters, knee capping with nail guns, burning feet with blowtorches, and nailing hands to tables. Worse, the victims are almost invariably murdered. Read, not surprisingly, attempts to rationalise such barbarism, mounting the bleak argument that his targets are drug dealers, themselves responsible for dozens of deaths, and who are invariably armed and willing to kill to defend their money.

By any civilised view, Mark Brandon Read is a monster. The question is: What made him like that? Was he born or made that way? There are interesting points to ponder.

Although Read is in the criminal world, he is not of it. Unlike most of those who he has been imprisoned with and preyed on for most of his adult life, he is not from a criminal family, condemned by breeding and circumstances to the endless cycle of crime and punishment. The opposite, in fact, appears to be true.

Reads father was a law-abiding former soldier who held down respectable if undistinguished jobs before his retirement. And Read describes his estranged mother and sister as devout Christians. His mother, a strict Seventh Day Adventist, was the daughter of an Adventist clergyman, and his uncle is a well-known doctor who gives medical advice on the radio.

But underneath the outwardly respectable facade, there were stresses in the family which resulted in his parents being divorced when he was a teenager. Stresses which, although Read refuses to discuss them in detail, he often alludes to, saying he had a strange and miserable childhood.

One extraordinary fact is that as an infant he was placed in an orphanage for more than 18 months before being returned to his parents. Another is that he was sent to mental institutions as a teenager where, he claims, he was given shock and deep sleep therapy. Yet another fact is that his father, like many former soldiers, exhibited (on his sons evidence) some of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Read says his father slept with a loaded gun at his side and ordered the boy to call him at night if he was going to the lavatory, to avoid being shot as an intruder. And it was his father who taught him to fight and to shoot, apparently sparking Reads adolescent obsession with firearms and military tactics.

Having said all that, it must be admitted Read is a more complex character than his reputation allows. As a lone gun in the criminal scene, he has studied the milieu with a critical eye and a remarkable memory. Although verging on illiterate, because of fragmented schooling, he is a keen observer whose dry wit and eye for drollery shines through his tortured handwriting and primitive spelling.