Years later and now a father to four adult children, Mr Broome said it was Read who gave him some crucial advice which helped turn his life around. “You could say I looked up to him (Chopper),” Mr Broome told. He didn’t meet his father until later in life and spent his formative years in foster care, longing for some connection, guidance and belonging. Mr Broome’s mother, who suffered severe mental illness, took her life when he was just days old after abandoning him at a police station. It may sound hard to believe that the underworld figure Read, who once forced another prisoner to chop off his ears in a bid to be moved from H Division, acted as a mentor to a troubled kid.īut for a teenager in need of direction, Read was just the mentor he needed. Glenn Broome has moved beyond his troubled past and now works as a prison counsellor. However in an interview on 60 Minutes before his death in 2013, the self-confessed murderer, kidnapper, torturer and standover man, said he actually only killed between “four and seven” people. Read claimed to have killed several people but was never convicted of murder. Jailed at just 17, Read spent 23 years in prison, later becoming a celebrity and author. “He was incredibly humorous, sarcastic and always politically motivated, especially when it came to prison politics.”Ĭhopper rose to notoriety for his crime claims and colourful life which was later made into a 2000 film starring Eric Bana. “He was certainly a real character,” Mr Broome, who now works as a prison counsellor, said of his time spent alongside Read while in high security H Division.

It would have been so easy for him to stay on that path, but there was one surprising person who helped the then teenager get back on the straight and narrow - Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. The troubled foster kid who was jailed for armed robbery soon found himself alongside some of Victoria’s toughest and most violent criminals. They divorced in 2003 and Chopper married an old flame, Margaret, who now works as a teacher’s aide.WHEN Glenn Broome wound up inside Pentridge prison at just 17, he had no idea how brutal prison life would be. While behind bars in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison he married first wife Mary-Ann Hodge.Īfter his release they lived on a local farm and son Charlie was born in 1999. READ ABOUT ANDREW RULE’S FIRST MEETING WITH CHOPPER This led to reporters John Silvester and Andrew Rule creating Chopper from the Inside.

READ ABOUT THE MURDERS CHOPPER CLAIMED HE COMMITTEDīut then, on his deathbed in 2013, he admitted he’d lied about murdering Ozerkam and three others.ĭesperate for publicity, Read would send letters to Melbourne’s The Sun newspaper office. Read had always claimed that the killing of Sammy The Turk outside Bojangles nightclub was done in self-defence.ĭecades later he declared in a television interview that it had been “outright murder”. READ WHAT A FORMER DETECTIVE THOUGHT OF CHOPPER Read enlisted the aid of another inmate to lop off his ears with a razor blade, and doctors were unable to sew them back on. One of things Chopper was best known for was cutting off his own ears behind bars - something he didn’t actually do himself. He once tried to abduct a County Court judge at gunpoint. Photo: Suppliedīetween 20 and 38 Chopper spent much of his life in jail for offences including armed robbery and kidnapping.

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