Chopper ReadOne of the most notorious criminals in the Australian underworld, Mark Brandon Read became well known for his many violent acts that became immortalized in both books and films. Called “Chopper,” by those who knew him, Read was an intimidating figure who earned a reputation as a dangerous and psychopathic armed robber and kidnapper.
In his later life, Read became an accomplished author of crime novels, which detailed the crimes for which he was convicted, along with the more notorious incidents he had been involved from the 1970’s to late 1990’s, which included torture, gang violence and even suspected murder. The life of Chopper Read was one of violence and crime.
Born on November 17, 1954, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, to Keith Read, a former army and World War II veteran of Irish descent, and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. The family lived in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy, and the young Read suffered bullying at school and at home.
He later explained how by the age of fifteen, he had been on the “losing end of several hundred fights”, and that his father, usually on his mother’s recommendation, would beat him often as a child to toughen him up. His father presented the appearance of a law abiding citizen, but said his experiences in war had disturbed him. He once told his son about shooting Japanese prisoners of war.
He sufferend molestation as a child, and by the age of fourteen, he had been made a ward of the state. Placed in several mental institutions as a teenager, Read claimed he underwent electroshock therapy. The family moved often, from the Northern suburbs to the Mornington Peninsula and then to Prahran. He had hoped to join the army, but was rejected because of his flat feet. It was a turning point, and Read went a different more dangerous road.
From a young age, he was already an accomplished street fighter and became the leader of the Surrey Road gang, a group of teenaged delinquents who roamed the streets looking for trouble and gained a notorious reputation for violence. Read began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers based in massage parlours in the Prahran area. He later refined his method for shaking down dealers, and began kidnapping and torturing members of the criminal underworld.
He was known to use a blowtorch or bolt cutters to remove the toes of his victims, as an incentive for them to give him enough money so he would leave them alive. In 1975, Read was arrested and convicted of two counts of armed robbery. Imprisoned for a later crime in Pentridge’s H division, he founded a prison gang known as the “Overcoat Gang,” which became infamous for its violence against other inmates.
Read and his fellow gang members, James “Jimmy” Loughnan, a personal friend of Read, and Patrick “Blue” Barnes, wore long coats all year round to hide their weapons and became involved in a series of tit-for-tat series of jailhouse bashings. The overcoats were heavy-prison issue made inside the prison. They grey coats had blue patches stitched over the heart of the wearer front and back.
This was done so armed guards in prison towers could ‘shoot to kill’ more easily during a riot or escape attempt. The gang war came about after a painter and docker gunman by the name of John Palmer, accused Read of taking an extra sausage given for Christmas lunch. Read denied the accusation, and with the alleged knowledge of the prison guards, bashed Palmer, starting the long running vendetta known as the Painter’s and Dockers War, which was also known as the ‘Sausage War.’
In another incident, inmate ‘Mad Richard’ Mladenich was attacked with a spade in a labour yard. He refused to give evidence against Read over the attack, and was later shot dead during the Melbourne gangland war on the orders of Carl Williams. Released after three years, Read soon found himself back in prison. Loughnan attempted an escape in 1977, which failed and ended with his breaking both legs jumping from a Pentridge wall.
In January 1978, Read entered a County Court courtroom armed with a sawn-off shotgun and pointed it at the sitting judge. In the ensuing struggle, the Judge and others manage to disarm Read and he is apprehended. Read admits he planned to hold the judge hostage until his friend, inmate Jimmy Loughnan, was released. Back inside Pentridge’s H division in February 1978, Read asked another inmate, Kevin Taylor, to hack off parts of his ears. He later joked about starting a “van Gogh Club.”
Contrary to popular belief, this was not how he earned his “Chopper” nickname, but rather given to him long before this, from a childhood cartoon character. Read claimed this was to avoid an ambush by other inmates by being transferred to the mental health wing. The incident did, however, earn Read a notorious reputation among his fellow inmates.
Released once more, he soon found himself back in prison by May 1978, when he was jailed for 14 years for malicious wounding and trying to kidnap a judge. Between the ages of twenty and thirty-eight, Mark Brandon Read would spend just thirteen months as a free man, having spent the rest of his early years convicted of crimes including armed robbery, kidnapping, firearm offences, assault, arson, and impersonating a police officer.
On one of his brief spells of freedom, Chopper Read proved equally dangerous outside the prison walls. He once swaggered into a nightclub with two sticks of gelignite under his overcoat and a lit cigar in his hand. He flashed the explosive and threatened to light the wicks he’s twisted together, at which point, Alphonse Gangitano, the nightclubs security and standover man jumped to safety out a toilet window. Read would later resume his rivalry with Gangitano upon his release.
Sentenced for his attack on the judge, Read continued the war against the Painter’s and Dockers, a trade union with alleged links to organized crime. In December 1978, Read, Loughnan and another inmate escaped H Division, a section of the prison for high security prisoners, and climbed onto a roof, where Read repeatedly hit himself with a piece of nail-studded timber.
The following year in August, he was stabbed in the stomach. The circumstances of the attack are not fully known, but it was suspected Chopper Read was attacked because his associates believed he had gone too far after planning to cripple every other inmate in the division to win the gang war. Another theory concerns his long-time friend and fellow inmate James “Jimmy” Loughnan.
It was suspected that Loughnan conspired with another inmate to collect on a contract put on Read’s head by the Painters’ and Dockers’ Union. Read’s attacker was serial killer Greg “Bluey” Brazel, a psychopathic killer and members of the Overcoat Gang. As a result of the sneak attack, Read lost several feet of intestine.
When questioned over the incident, Read claimed not to remember details of the incident, but did comment on what he described as a “terrific sneak go,” that his intestines had split through the gash “like sausages.” Hospital staff were horrified to see that Read had split his stitches the next day doing push-ups. After bursting open the stitches, he told nurses that he was preparing for a revenge attack.
By early 1987, Read had been released from Pentridge and immediately began his rivalry with Alphonse Gangitano, who had become a well known criminal, extorting half the residents of Lygon street, as well as rigging boxing matches, bashing off-duty policemen and waving guns at people. He was called the “Black Prince of Lygon Street,” however Read derided him as a “plastic Godfather”.
According to Read, when he heard he was looking for him, Gangitano went overseas. Upon his return, he paid Read “a grand in the hand” on a monthly basis after Read casually told him he had seen his mother down the local Vic Market. However, Read was known to sprinkle the truth, and his associates knew him as a natural born yarn spinner who liked to embelish stories.
Read later explained that his disagreement with Gangitano stemmed from an elderly neighbourhood hero, whom Gangitano admired. It is alleged by Read that Gangitano burst open a toilet cubicle door along with a number of associates and began a serious assault on Read, who made his escape through an open window, but not before smearing his faeces into Gangitano’s face.
Between April and May 1987, Chopper Read is involved in two incidents that would see him sent back to prison. In April he shoots drug dealer Christopher Liapis in Footscray, and the following month burns down a house belonging to Nick Apostolidis. He would later write, “I burnt Nick the Greek’s house down. Big deal, I love a sunburnt country.”
In June 1987, Read shot dead Sammy “The Turk” Ozerkam outside Bojangles nightclub in St Kilda. At the time he was wearing a bulletproof vest given to him by police because rival criminals had put out a hit on him. Arrested for his crime, he claimed to the court the murder was self-defence. Tried by a jury, Read was found not guilty of manslaughter. He was, however, jailed in December 1989, for at least 2 years for intentionally causing serious injury to Liapis, committing arson and reckless conduct.
Released from Pentridge Prison in November 1991, Read moved to Tasmania vowing to go straight. Although this decision was likely done to stay away from people who wanted him killed. Before his release, Read handed control of the ‘Overcoat Gang’ to an up-and-coming young hoodlum, who renamed the gang Prisoners of War (POW), and went on to perpetrate more criminal acts and murder inside Pentridge.
A month later, his first book, Chopper: From the Inside, is published. In it he claims to have been involved in many killings, torture and bashings. “I regret nothing,” he wrote. In May 1992, Read is involved in an incident when his friend Sydney Collins is shot in Tasmania. During a drunken escapade, Read shot bikie Collins in the stomach.
He dropped Collins at the hospital afterwards, telling him, “You’re a staunch bloke, you won’t say nothing”. Arrested over the Collins shooting, Read claimed during his trial in August 1992 that “if I wanted to shoot the prick, he would be dead”. The jury convicted him of causing grevious bodily harm to Collins.
While behind bars at Risdon Prison in Tasmania, Read married Mary-Ann Hodge in 1995, and the couple’s son Charlie, born in 1999, was named after Read’s long time friend ‘Mad’ Charlie Hegyalji, who was shot dead in Melbourne’s gangland war. Released from prison for the last time in February 1998, Read lived on the Hodge family farm along with a menagerie of animals.
By the late 1990’s, the black humour of Read’s life had interested film executives, who wanted to make a movie about his criminal escapades. In March 1998, Read appeared drunk on ABC television’s McFeast Live show, and sparked a flood of angry calls after he jokes about killing people. Two months later, in May 1998, Read was charged with a firearms offence after being photographed with a gun for a publicity shoot. He was later acquitted.
The movie based on his crimes, titled Chopper, was released in August 2000. Starring Eric Bana as Mark Brandon Read, who spent two days living with him so he could get a better understanding of how to play his character, the film, whose tagline was “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” was met with critical acclaim. Over the next thirteen years, it was the highest grossing R18+ film in Australian history.
In 2001, Read and Hodge divorced. Tow years later he married his long-time friend Margaret Cassar. The couple have a son, Roy. Over the course of the next decade, Read stars in a number of films and television shows, such as Trojan Warrior, The Groomless Bride, The Wild Colonial Psychos alongside disgraced former cop Roger Rogerson, and even released his hip hop track Chop Chop.
In December 2008, he made headlines when he was questioned by police over an alleged incident that occurred in Johnson Street, Collingwood. Read said he was attacked by a man he had never met before wielding tomahawk. He told police, “I ran to the panelbeater’s and grabbed a pipe. I said, ‘Come here now’ and he jumped into a car and pissed off.”
Chopper Read suffered a minor injury to his arm after being hit with the blunt end of the tomahawk, and after questioning by detectives at Richmond police station, he was released without charge. The alleged tomahawk-wielding attacker was not identified. In April 2012, Mark Brandon Read revealed he had terminal liver cancer.
He claimed he had contracted hepatitis from sharing razor blades inside Pentridge. Read was questioned over the disappearance of Sidney Collins, who is still listed on the Australian Missing Person list after going missing under suspicious circumstances. Read denied any involvement in Collins disappearance.
Mark Brandon Read died on October 9, 2013 at the age of 58 in Parkville, Victoria, Australia. Several days later, his last interview on the 60 Minutes program aired on October 20th. During this interview, Read finally admitted to having murdered his former friend Sydney Collins. Although he expressed no remorse for killing Collins, he alleged the biker was “stupid” for allowing Read to shoot him on two occasions with his own gun.
He also discussed the 1971 shooting of union boss Desmond Costello, the 1974 ‘suicide’ of child sex offender Reginald Isaacs and the shooting of Siam “Sammy the Turk” Ozerkam at Bojangles nightclub in 1987. Read variously claimed to have been involved in the killing of 19 people and the attempted murder of 11 others. In his book Chopper, Read wrote that he regretting nothing. Shortly before his death was said, “I know I have said that I regret nothing, but the truth is that I regret plenty. I regret my whole life.”
John Brennan Crutchley Dubbed the Vampire Rapist, John Brennan Crutchley was a suspected serial killer who drank the blood of one of his kidnapping victims.
Red Inn Murders The Red Inn Murders were occurred in France during the 19th century, where the proprietors of an inn killed and cannibalised their clientele.
George “G” Williams During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, George “G” Williams carried out a murderous vendetta against Suge Knight and his Death Row Records.
Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping The Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping occurred on February 1, 2026, when the 84-year-old mother of US News anchor Savannah Guthrie vanished.
Atlas Vampire Case The unsolved murder of a Swedish prostitute has become known as the Atlas Vampire case, because the killer drank the victims blood.
Ian Watkins As the lead singer of Welsh rock band the Lostprophets, Ian Watkins had legions of fans, but few could know he was a prolific child abuser.
Copyright © 2025 The True Crime Database. All Rights Reserved.
