In Australian slang a toecutter is a criminal who preys on other criminals. He goes after the men who have just come into money, the robbers and the dealers, because they are the one kind of victim who can never go to the police. The word came out of Sydney in the early 1970s, and within ten years it had reached the Senate, the cinema and the dictionaries.
The dictionary meaning
Australia already had a word for the older trade. A standover man took money from illegal casinos, brothels and bookmakers in return for leaving them alone. The toecutter stood over the people with the most cash and the least protection.
A slang dictionary of 1986 defined a toecutter as a standover man who chops people's feet off "to indicate, in a jovial fashion, that they have rather stepped out of line". In the next sentence it gave a second meaning: "In the political terminology one who is extremely ruthless." By a 2013 edition the feet had dropped out of the definition. The two senses were a "criminal thug who intimidates and brutalises people for a crime boss" and a "particularly ruthless person, especially in politics".
Where the word came from
The word comes from a gang. On 4 March 1970 three men robbed a Mayne Nickless armoured van at Guildford in Sydney's western suburbs and took $587,890. A man holding stolen money cannot report it stolen, and a group of Sydney criminals went after the robbers' shares. They became known as the Toe Cutters, because the story went that the money was got out of a man one toe at a time, with bolt cutters, until he said where it was. Read who the Toe Cutters were.
In 2020 a New South Wales coroner gave the gang its only official definition: "a Sydney criminal gang whose modus operandi was extortion of money from other known criminals". Her findings say nothing about toes.
First in print: Canada, 1974
The earliest use in print that the lexicographers have found is not Australian. On 26 April 1974 the Calgary Herald, in Alberta, explained to its readers that the Toecutters had "gained notoriety by torturing members of a gang which held up an armored car in Sydney in 1970".
Reg "Toecutter" Withers
By 1975 the word had moved into politics. Reg Withers, the Liberal leader in the Senate, spent that spring making sure none of his senators crossed the floor to pass Gough Whitlam's budget. The supply bills were blocked, the Governor-General dismissed the government in November, and Withers went into the history books as the Toecutter. "Reg Withers earned the nickname 'Toecutter' because he was very, very tough," the political commentator Peter Kennedy said. The Museum of Australian Democracy was more definite about where it came from: "His nickname, 'Toecutter', was derived from a Sydney gang who would remove the toes of their victims." When he died in November 2014, at ninety, SBS put the word in the middle of his name: Reg "Toecutter" Withers.
Money Movers and Mad Max
Bruce Beresford's film Money Movers (1979) put the method itself on screen: a man in a chair in a quiet suburban house who has just lost one toe, and a gang boss offering to "move along your foot toe by toe".
The same year, Mad Max gave the name to its villain. George Miller cast Hugh Keays-Byrne, a Sydney actor who had been with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as the leader of the motorcycle gang. The budget could not stretch to flying the Sydney actors down to Melbourne, so they rode the bikes, and, as Miller remembered it, during the ride "they became the Toecutter biker gang". The rest of the gang were real bikers who answered an advertisement in a bike shop window. Mad Max made more than a hundred million dollars and took the word round the world.
Chopper Read
In 1991 a Melbourne prisoner made the word his brand. Mark "Chopper" Read's first book has a chapter called Toecutting, and asks why he chose "to become a toecutter, a man who lived by torturing other criminals and robbing them". His biographer later concluded that he never cut off anyone's toes. Read about Chopper Read and the Toe Cutters.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott tells how a gang of Sydney criminals became a word: the robbery, the hunt for the money, the men who vanished, and the legend that outgrew them.