Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, 1954–2013

As one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters, Mark “Chopper” Read once boasted of having killed 19 people without ever facing a single murder trial. But he later acknowledged that he had exaggerated his criminal exploits. “Look, honestly, I haven’t killed that many people,” he said earlier this year. “Probably about four or seven, depending on how you look at it.”

Read had a troubled childhood in Melbourne, said CNN.com. At 14, he was committed to a mental institution, and he claimed to have been subjected to 60 sessions of shock therapy there in three months. He began his “apprenticeship in crime” by thieving from fellow criminals. “Why rob a straight guy of $20 when you can rob a drug dealer of $10,000 and he can’t go running to the police?” he said. Read soon became infamous for torturing gangland criminals, using a blowtorch to burn his victims, or clipping their toes off with bolt cutters. During a stint in prison, he earned his nickname after asking a fellow inmate to cut off parts of both of his ears.

Read was “no underworld mastermind,” said The Sydney Morning Herald. Between the ages of 20 and 38 he spent only 13 months as a free man—“hardly the CV of a top crook.” His reputation for violence came mostly from his time behind bars, when he led a prison gang armed with an “impressive array of homemade weapons.” The details of his jailhouse capers made it into a 1991 book he wrote with a crime reporter while behind bars. “No publisher would touch it” at first, but Chopper: From the Inside became an unlikely best seller—and its subject a celebrity in his homeland. A movie of his life, starring Eric Bana, was made in 2000.

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Read swore off crime for his final two decades, said the Melbourne Age, and he maintained that he had no regrets about his past. After being diagnosed with cirrhosis, he refused a liver transplant in 2008, saying he didn’t deserve one. “I’m not going to put my name down against some 10-year-old kid,” he said.