His later works state that he did so to 'win a bet'. In his biography, Read claimed this was to avoid an ambush by other inmates by being transferred to the mental health wing. Around this time, Read had a fellow inmate cut both of his ears off to be able to leave H division temporarily. 'The Overcoat Gang' wore long coats all year round to conceal their weapons, were involved in several hundred acts of violence against a larger gang during this period. While in Pentridge Prison's H division in the late 1970s, Read launched a prison war. Read spent only 13 months outside prison between the ages of 20 and 38, having been convicted of crimes including armed robbery, firearm offences, assault, arson, impersonating a police officer and kidnapping. He later graduated to kidnapping and torturing members of the criminal underworld, often using a blowtorch or bolt cutters to remove the toes of his victims as an incentive for them to produce enough money so that Read would leave them alive. He began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers based in massage parlours in the Prahran area. When he was still young, Read was already an accomplished street fighter and the leader of the Surrey Road gang, which had a notorious reputation for violence. 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 states he underwent electroshock therapy. He was bullied at school, saying that by the age of 15 he had been on the 'losing end of several hundred fights' and that his father, usually on his mother's recommendation, beat him often as a child.

He grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy. He was placed in a children's home for the first five years of his life. Read was born on 17 November 1954 to a former army and World War II veteran father Keith Read of Irish descent and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist.

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