On a sunny day in the mid1980s, Mark Brandon Read decided to get away from it all by heading to a remote Australian beach with his girlfriend. Alongside the cans of cold beer in his beach bag, he packed an automatic handgun, a five-shot revolver, an automatic pistol, a sawn-off shotgun, two Magnum revolvers, an automatic pistol and a fully automatic 30-shot machine gun with a silencer.
"Chopper" Read, a Melbourne "headhunter" who made his money by terrorising other criminals, had a price on his head. Worse, his shredded ears (the result of Read instructing a fellow prisoner to slash them off to facilitate his transfer to another prison block) and huge, tattooed torso were a dead giveaway. Chopper, named after a 1960s cartoon character, appeared to be heading for the chop.
"Those were my very paranoid days," says an altogether cheerier Chopper from his new home in Tasmania. "I was certifiably insane. I wasn't a well person." After spending most of the last two decades in prison, he is now a free man and a bestselling author. He celebrates his 46th birthday this month, just as a film about his life is released in Britain and Ireland.
But, says writer-director Andrew Dominik, "the film is a dramatisation in which liberties have been taken. It is not a biography." Although Read approves of the film, many do not. Rupert Murdoch's Fox corporation dropped it, while one Sydney cinema owner refused to show it, arguing that it should not have received government funding because it glamorises the actions of "a moronic, low-life thug". Fran Bladel, Women's Representative for the Tasmanian government, accused the film of conveying the message "that to be cruel and vindictive and to beat women pushes you to hero status with a certain class of people".
Nevertheless, Chopper has been a huge hit, the first restricted 18-rated film to become an Australian box-office number one. From the moment the first fleet of prison ships arrived in 1788 to set up the penal colony that became Sydney, Australia has loved the idea of the larrikin - the wisecracking, anti-authoritarian hoodlum. There was Ned Kelly, the bank robber, who became an icon after being hanged for murder in Melbourne in 1880. Leslie "Squizzy" Taylor, leader of the next generation of gangsters, enjoyed near-celebrity status in the city in the 1920s. Both have been the subject of books and films.
"Chopper has virtually vaulted into Australian language - people will talk about `doing a Chopper Read'," says John Silvester, a hard-bitten crime journalist for the Melbourne Age. Silvester did much to make it happen, editing all the books that Read roughed out on headed notepaper in Melbourne's notorious high-security Pentridge prison.
"The media created me," says Read, remembering his time spent entertaining courtrooms in the 1970s. "Maybe it was my black sense of humour in the face of adversity that appealed to one or two journalists. I'm on some shooting charge and, the next thing you know, there are 50 members of the press in attendance. The case became a half-hour comedy session. Even the judge would burst out laughing. As a kid I was 6ft 2in, 18 stone, built like an ox, with lots of ego and I had this couldn't-care-less sense of humour. It was a breath of fresh air to have someone who said: `Yes, I did it'.
"There was one case in court where the judge gave me two and a half years and I said: `Two and a half years? How am I going to hold my head up with two and a half years?' I said: `I blew that bloke's leg off. Two and a half years? I'm not leaving here until I get at least three.' And the judge said: `You take your two and a half years and be happy with it.' The media were falling about the place.
"I failed to see the seriousness of my own life until I was about 40. The media loved me because I always had some insane quote or some funny story to tell. There were quite a few obscure reporters that became very well-known on the strength that they could always get an interview with me. If you're going to enter the criminal world, what's the use just finishing up a name on a tombstone and no one has ever heard of you? Bugger that. You go all the way or not at all."
Read went all the way, from an inauspicious start - for a criminal. Born in 1954, his upbringing by a strict Seventh Day Adventist mother and retired soldier father was ostensibly respectable. "Personally, I think I am owed an apology," Read says of his early years.
After running away from home on many occasions, he was sent to a mental hospital and given electric shock treatment. His father, traumatised after fighting in the second World War, slept with a loaded gun by his bed and taught his son to love weapons. Read tried to join the army but failed the psychiatric test. He dabbled in boxing and soon graduated from teenage troublemaker to Melbourne gang leader.
Sydney is famed for its corruption and white-collar crime, but Melbourne has long been regarded as the home of real Australian gangsters. Criminal gangs "stood over" its dens of drink, prostitution and gambling in the 1960s and 1970s before turning to the drug trade, particularly heroin, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Read terrorised his fellow criminals, robbing massage parlours and taking on contracts to maim and kill rivals throughout the 1970s. He had a Boy's Own view of society, reckons Silvester, until he was stabbed in jail by his best friend, Jimmy Loughnan.
He was only in prison with Loughnan because he had tried in vain to fulfil a promise to get his mate released by abducting a Melbourne district court judge from a courtroom in 1978. Stitched up after his stabbing, Read was found doing press-ups in his cell with his intestines hanging out. Word spread of what Silvester calls "his extraordinary capacity to deliver and absorb pain". Unmarried, with no children and estranged from all his family apart from his dad, he seemed untouchable.
After his release in 1986, even Melbourne's crooks flinched at some of his tactics, which included demanding money from criminals by threatening to blow them both up, with a deranged grin and a stick of gelignite strapped to his chest.
Seven months later, Read was accused of killing drug-dealer Siam "Sammy the Turk" Ozerkam, after shooting him through the eye outside a nightclub. Miraculously, he was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. But, by the end of 1987, he was banged up for burning down another drugdealer's house, firing shots into the dealer's mother's home and shooting a criminal in the leg. "It was a busy few months," comments Read.
In 1990, Silvester wrote an article debunking the cult growing up around Chopper. Read replied with a Christmas card saying: "My idea of a perfect Christmas would be to own a 1,000-room hotel and find a dead reporter behind each door. Ha ha ha."
But Chopper had found someone to tell his story to and began maniacally firing off letters to Silvester, who turned them into Chopper's first autobiography. "I have been involved in 19 deaths inside and outside jail since 1971," boasted Chopper in his literary debut. He went on to describe how he extorted money from criminals and roasted their feet with blowtorches.
"Nobody had ever spoken or written in that way in Australia," says Silvester. "He said, `Yeah, I've done everything you think I have and worse', and he said it with black humour and a total lack of contrition."
Written mainly from his prison cell, Read's nine books have sold more than 400,000 copies via word of mouth, in a country where a 10,000 sale denotes bestseller status. They are also said to be the most shoplifted books in the country.
Read was freed in 1992, proclaiming that he would never get into trouble again. Shortly afterwards, he was charged with shooting a biker associate. He returned to jail, married his girlfriend, Mary-Ann, and carried on writing.
Released from prison in 1998, he announced his retirement from crime, saying he had a wife and publishers to support. He moved to a remote farm in Tasmania with Mary-Ann and they have a 14-month-old son, Charles. When not writing more "silly books", he chops wood for a living. He says he doesn't have many friends and keeps himself to himself.
Read has often rationalised his violence by arguing he is not a murderer but "a garbage disposal expert". He dismisses his victims with lines like: "He was a deserving soul". Some Australians agree, seeing Chopper as a vigilante, a "Dirty Harry figure", says Silvester. Numerous women sent Read admiring letters after he mentioned beating up a sex offender in prison. But he has never pretended to be Robin Hood.
Read is scathing about the "plastic godfathers" he terrorised. "I virtually went to war with them for 20 years, and I came out alive. What does that say for them?" Much of his writing is near-satire on Melbourne's criminal fraternity, "a totally unbelievable, blood-soaked, insane comedy of errors".
Read still dreams about his victims in his sleep and found Chopper a hard film to watch. He says 95 per cent of it is true. "I didn't realise until after the film that I had this terrible habit of apologising to people after some sort of major violent incident."
When the film was released, it was feared he was pocketing the profits. But Read was having the last laugh - donating all his money to a police charity supporting children with cancer.
"Most crooks end up dead and unknown," he comments. "You walk through the shadow of the valley of death and you try to get to the other end alive. Very few people make it. I emerged alive, married, with a 14-month-old son. The one who wins the game is the one who lives the longest."
Chopper is showing at the IFC. Website: www.chopperthemovie.com