Mark "Chopper" Read
Australian criminal, author and rapper (1954-2013)
Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (17 November 1954 – 9 October 2013) was an Australian convicted criminal, gang member and author. Read wrote a series of semi-autobiographical fictional crime novels and children's books. The 2000 film Chopper is based on his life.
Early life
Read was born on 17 November 1954 to Keith Read, an army and World War II veteran of Irish descent, and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. He grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy. Read was bullied at school; he said that by the age of 15 he had been on the "losing end of several hundred fights" and that his father, usually on his mother's recommendation, beat him often. Read was also molested as a child. He was made a ward of the state by the age of 14, and was placed in several mental institutions as a teenager; he stated that he underwent electroshock therapy there.
Criminal activity
When he was still young, Read was already an accomplished street fighter and the leader of the Surrey Road gang, which had a reputation for violence. He began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers based in massage parlours in the Prahran area.
The public source identifies “Mark "Chopper" Read” as australian criminal, author and rapper (1954-2013). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mark, Chopper and Read.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2428420. VIAF identifies the subject as 9061265. The Library of Congress control number is n93090351. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 2013 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mark "Chopper" Read” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.