Andrew Rule: Story of Syd and Chopper is a tale of two idiots

CHOPPER Read and Syd Collins were linked by a thick headed criminality that would be funny it wasn’t so threatening, writes Andrew Rule.

Sydney Michael Edward Collins, as he was known to police all his adult life, had been a founding member and president of the Melbourne chapter of an outlaw bikie gang conveniently known as the Outlaws.

But Sydney had differences with Melbourne, so he moved to Tasmania around the time Mark 'Chopper' Read decided to cross Bass Strait after a long spell in Pentridge in 1991.

Read calculated he wouldn’t be as tempting a target there as he would be on the mainland after publication of his outrageously successful memoir, Chopper From The Inside, which delighted tens of thousands of readers but enraged some underworld figures he mocked in it.

Better to be a big fish in a small puddle and stay out of trouble while he scrawled the outline of a sequel and set up house with Margaret Cassar, the long-suffering girlfriend who would eventually become his second wife. While book royalties were flowing his way, Read could avoid the only other “job” he’d ever known: standing over cashed-up criminals, notably drug dealers.

But rural Tasmania was a long way from the bright lights in 1992 and a bored Chopper soon fell in with people who shared his hobbies.

He formed the “Hole in the Head” shooting club: Read and his driver Trent Anthony and various bikers and hangers-on would gather on the bushy outskirts of Evandale, drinking beer and using the empty bottles for target practice. Among the group was Syd Collins, by then linked to the Black Uhlans. But mixing gunpowder, alcohol and criminal recklessness had to end badly.

In late 1992, Read gave a TV interview that would go around the world — largely because it featured him shooting a beer stubby held by the trusting Trent Anthony, William Tell style.

Syd Collins, showing scars he received after being shot by Mark Chopper Read

Chopper Read.

TIMELINE: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF CHOPPER READ

Four days later, he was arrested for shooting Syd Collins as Collins sat in the back of Read’s Ford Fairmont in a farm lane after a session at the Clarendon Arms pub in Evandale.

Collins got lucky. He did not die outright — and Read dropped him outside a local hospital where his wounds were treated in time. Collins informed police that Read had shot him. That was enough, with Read’s crazily high media profile, to have the earless standover man locked up indefinitely under Tasmania’s catch-all Dangerous Criminal law.

The court heard he had said in a television interview that cutting toes off “with a bolt cutter is rather poofy. I prefer using a blowtorch”. When cross-examined by Tasmania’s chief prosecutor Damian Bugg, he admitted burning toes with a blowtorch. Read later commented: “To rev it up for the ratings I came over as a right mental case. Great for ratings, bad for courtrooms.”

He wrote to Collins in hospital: “Dear Syd, I regret to inform you I will be unable to attend your forthcoming wedding celebrations due to pending legal matters. Wishing you a speedy recovery. Regards, Mark.”

He would later name a slow greyhound The Buggster after the prosecutor, just to show there were no hard feelings. But a sense of humour did not help him avoid jail. He served almost six years before colourful QC, politician and boxing referee Michael Hodgman obtained his release after advising him to marry a “good Tasmanian girl”.

Criminal figure turned artist Mark Chopper Read. Picture: Craig Borrow/Newspix

The boxing barrister was best man when Read married farmer’s daughter Mary Ann Hodge in Risdon Prison, well after Margaret had returned to Melbourne, disillusioned by the jail sentence.

When Read got out, he and Mary Ann had a son, Charlie, who was named after Read’s former gangster mate who was murdered in his Caulfield garden the year before his namesake was born in 1999.

Meanwhile, the bullet-scarred Syd returned to the mainland — whether over fears for his safety or to pursue business interests is unclear. But it was certainly the business interests that led to his arrest near Ballarat in 1994. Federal police swooped on a battered Camira sedan. In the boot, stashed around the spare tyre under dirty clothes, were four fat packets of white powder alleged to be an illicit drug worth lots of money. They also found a loaded semiautomatic pistol.

The police arrested Collins and three others but, again, Collins got lucky. He was acquitted on a technicality.

He moved interstate again — this time to the Gold Coast, a mecca for southern crooks who found Tasmania a little chilly. There, police say, he did a little amphetamines dealing and a lot of trading in mail-order brides, this with the assistance of his own bride, who conveniently lived in Russia. It must have been lucrative as Collins travelled to China 27 times in the space of a year.

Like any careful businessman, Collins spread his investments. On August 24, 1992, one cash deal led him to drive from his Pimpama home across the border to Tabulam, near Casino. Such an errand wouldn’t seem much for someone who had survived a brush with a 9mm bullet and arrest by the nation’s finest. But debt collecting can be a risky business.

Collins’s son reported him missing on September 1. His Falcon V8 ute was found near Tabulum next day but he was never seen again. Syd’s luck had finally run out. He was 46.

There was speculation that Read might have had something to do with the disappearance, a theory he denied but did little to dispel.

“He cost me five years and nine months of my life, so it would be just terrible to think that someone might have killed him,” Read told the Gold Coast Bulletin, poker faced.

Two detectives from Casino flew south in late October 2002 to see Read, by then back in Melbourne and reunited with Margaret.

“I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just talk to me by phone instead of coming all the way from Casino, but then the penny dropped,” Read said mischievously.

“They have arranged the visit to Melbourne to coincide with the Spring Racing Carnival. Maybe they will find things to do down here so they can take in the Melbourne Cup.”

Drugs and a gun were found in the wheel well of Syd Collins' car.

In another interview he said: “They asked me if I’d killed Syd or had him killed and I told them I hadn’t seen him or had anything to do with him since I last saw him in the Hobart Supreme Court nearly 10 years ago.”

But the consummate yarn spinner put a twist in the tale a decade later when he claimed on camera just before he died in 2013 — in what 60 Minutes touted as a “deathbed confession” — that he had caught up with Collins and killed him in revenge.

Police never believed a word of it, but that didn’t matter. Read never let facts get in the way of a good story and always knew the value of a surprise ending. Even his own.

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