No name did more to make the word toecutter famous than Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read. He put it in print, on stage and on television, and the film Chopper (2000) opens with Eric Bana, as Read, calling himself "just a normal bloke who likes a bit of torture". But the gang that gave the trade its name was a Sydney gang of the early 1970s, and Read was a Melbourne prisoner who came to it late.
"Why did I choose to become a toecutter?"
Read's first book, Chopper: From the Inside (1991), has a chapter called Toecutting, and it opens with that question. His answer was the logic of the trade. Selling drugs was beneath him, he wrote, when he could simply rob the dealer, and "no-one ever informs on the toecutter for the crime of torture". He called the toecutter "the natural enemy of the bank robber". It was the same reasoning that had sent a Sydney gang after the Guildford robbers twenty years before.
He described his tools like a tradesman: bolt cutters, and a gas bottle that he preferred because men talked once they saw the flame. On television he made it sound like business. "We simply went along and we negotiated with people," he told Andrew Denton on the ABC's Enough Rope in 2007.
The teacher: Jimmy the Pom
Read claimed a teacher. In his first book he called him Jimmy "The Pom" Driscoll. In his second he held the name back, out of what he called etiquette, and wrote that the Pom, with "Sydney and Melbourne criminals", had started the gang that "became known and feared as the 'Toecutter Gang'".
The real man was Linus Patrick Driscoll, an Englishman whom a New South Wales coroner later listed among the men "believed to have been" in the Toe Cutters. Driscoll was convicted in 1975 of murdering Jake Maloney, had the conviction quashed by the High Court in 1977, and was acquitted at his retrial. Read himself wrote that the Pom had been "rightly acquitted".
The dates suggest where they met. Read was born in November 1954 and said he was twenty-four at the time, which puts the meeting between late 1978 and late 1979. Read spent most of that period in Pentridge, and Driscoll was serving a Victorian sentence for guns before he was deported to England in 1979. A Victorian prison is the likeliest place.
Read also passed on the Pom's stories, including a "tattoo torture" in New South Wales in the early 1970s. He gave it his own verdict: "just another old criminal yarn".
What the biographers found
Read told everybody what he had done and then told them not to believe it. "Now how many times in those books have I got to tell you that in certain areas I'm pulling your leg," he said to Denton.
In 2014 his biographer, Adam Shand, went through the legend claim by claim in The Real Chopper. He concluded that Read had never cut off anyone's toes with bolt cutters or put a blowtorch to anyone's feet, and that the bolt cutters and the blowtorch had been borrowed from the legend of Linus Driscoll. The writer Mark Dapin went further in 2025. What Read really took from other criminals, he wrote, "was not their toes but their stories". He called Driscoll "the real leader of the actual Toecutter Gang".
What Chopper Read actually did
The record of what Read did is grim enough without the borrowing:
- 26 January 1978: he held a sawn-off shotgun to the throat of Judge Bill Martin in the County Court in Melbourne, trying to free his friend Jimmy Loughnan. He was sentenced to thirteen years.
- Pentridge, 1970s: in H Division he led the Overcoat Gang in a prison war he said ran to more than a hundred attacks. Nobody has ever checked his figures.
- 1987: he shot Siam "Sammy the Turk" Ozerkam dead outside the Bojangles nightclub in St Kilda. A jury acquitted him on self-defence in 1989. On 60 Minutes in 2013, dying, he said it was murder.
- 1992: he shot a former motorcycle club president in Tasmania and was declared a dangerous criminal. He walked out of Risdon prison in 1998, having spent nearly twenty-four years of his life inside.
He died of liver cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital on 9 October 2013, at fifty-eight. At his memorial, the celebrant read a script prepared by his family. Some of what he told reporters was true, it said, some was borrowed, and some was invented outright.
The fourteen toecutters
A line is still repeated in Read's name, that there are always fourteen toecutters in Australia. Nobody has found it in any of his books. The only fourteen on the record comes from the Denton interview, when he was asked whether readers should believe him. "I mean the books are fourteen dollars ninety five," he said, "it's not the Holy Bible."
Where the legend came from
Read borrowed most of his toecutting stories, and most of what he borrowed came from Sydney. The gang behind it went after the robbers of a Mayne Nickless armoured van at Guildford in 1970, and within four years most of its members were dead, missing or deported. Read who the original Toe Cutters were.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott gives Chopper Read a full chapter: the County Court siege, the Overcoat War, his apprenticeship to the Pom and the legend he built from other men's stories. The rest of the book tells the history he borrowed.