Mark ‘Chopper’ Read: The brutal murderer who inspired an AC/DC hit
If there’s one thing you can’t do without as Australia’s premiere rock ‘n’ roll band, it’s a song about Australia’s hardest criminal. In 1974, AC/DC released ‘Jailbreak’, a song inspired by the convicted criminal, gang leader, torture fanatic and children’s author Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.
Though the single doesn’t namecheck Read, it was written after Ben Scott came across an article about an escape attempt the convict planned with his crime associate Jimmy Loughan, whose fear of tight spaces led to the pair’s capture and subsequent solitary confinement.
Sadly, ‘Jailbreak’ doesn’t give us any information about Read, Australia’s most famous criminal after Ned Kelly. Tattooed and mutton-chopped, Read began his criminal career as the leader of the Surrey Road gang, a streetfighting gang with a reputation for extreme violence.
As a young man, he robbed drug dealers based in massage parlours in and around Prahran, later moving on to kidnapping and torture to extract more money from his hostages, most of whom were members of the criminal underworld. One of his favourite tricks was using boltcutters to remove his victim’s toes one by one.
Despite this, he managed to develop a reputation as a “good bloke” who would only hurt people who deserved it. Soon enough, he’d become known as the scourge of Melbourne’s seedy underbelly. Incidentally, the nickname ‘Chopper’ has nothing to do with his taste for violence. It was, in fact, inspired by a kid’s cartoon character.
Read was raised in the suburbs of Melbourne by an ex-army father and a Seventh-Day Adventist mother. He was placed in a children’s home early on and would later claim that he was viciously beaten by his father, usually on his mother’s recommendation. He was bullied at school, too, and, at the age of 14, was placed in a psychiatric institution where he was subjected to electro-shock therapy. In the mid-1970s, Read was sentenced to 17 years in Melbourne’s Pentridge prison after kidnapping a judge in an attempt to get his gang-mate Jimmy Loughan freed. During his time behind bars, he became involved in prison gang wars.
Looking for safety, he requested a transfer to another wing. When his request was denied, he decided to cut off both his ears: “They said there was no way I would be getting a transfer, so I made the simple decision that ears off = transfer. Believe me, it works.” The letters Read wrote during this time would come to form the bulk of his highly successful memoirs, inspiring the character of Keith Blackwell in William Gibson’s The Bridge trilogy.
Shortly after the transfer, Read was stabbed by members of his own gang. He survived but lost several feet of his intestinal tract. By the time his books became popular, he was being held at a maximum-security prison. One of his most devoted readers was Mary Anne Hodge, who he married in 1995. He would later claim that the birth of their son was the first time he felt like a member of the human race.
He certainly became more conscientious. Just a couple of years later, he appeared in an advertisement warning against drunk driving. He usually maintained that he’d killed 19 people in total but would later tell The New York Times that the number was probably closer to eight or nine. Still, he never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
