Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (born 17 November 1954), is an Australian ex-convict, author, and celebrity. He is also a recording and performance artist. The 2000 film Chopper was based on his life.
Read was born to an ex-army father and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. He was placed in a children's home for the first five years of his life. Read grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood, Thomastown, Fitzroy and Preston. He wa...
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Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (born 17 November 1954), is an Australian ex-convict, author, and celebrity. He is also a recording and performance artist. The 2000 film Chopper was based on his life.
Read was born to an ex-army father and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. He was placed in a children's home for the first five years of his life. Read grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood, Thomastown, Fitzroy and Preston. He was bullied at school, claiming that by the age of 15, he had been on the "losing end of several hundred fights", and his father, usually on his mother's recommendation, beat him often as a child. Read was made a Ward of the State by the age of 14 and was placed in several mental institutions as a teenager, where, he later claimed, he was subjected to electroshock therapy.
By his mid-teens, Read was already an accomplished street fighter and the leader of the Surrey Road gang. He began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers, based in...
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