Mark "Chopper" Read was a villain or a larrikin, depending on who you ask.
Even those working as police in Victoria when Read was a kidnapper and standover man have differing opinions.
Former assistant commissioner Noel Ashby, who was a sergeant in St Kilda when Read was "hanging around" the area, says he never saw him as a threat.
But Chief Commissioner Ken Lay can't forget the "pretty horrible things" Read did in his youth.
"He's put his hand up for four murders, done 23 years in jail, done armed robberies," Mr Lay told Fairfax Radio.
"I'm finding it difficult to be glowing of Mark Read's contribution to Victorian society."
Ashby's account of the criminal-turned-author is of a non-threatening crook.
"I remember coordinating the intercept of Alphonse Gangitano," Mr Ashby said of the murdered gangland figure.
"We had four police cars with each car having specific instructions about what to do and how we would react if someone became violent.
"With Mark Read you'd pull up next to him and say, `what are you doing Chopper?' You knew there would be no danger to us."
Following his death from liver cancer on Wednesday, those who knew Read have come forward with stories and memories that add to the colourful and sometimes contradictory yarns spun by the 58-year-old in his second life as a raconteur, writer and public speaker.
His manager Andrew Parisi said Read died living a quiet family life and paying his taxes.
"He worked as a writer, painter and public speaker, paid his taxes and took care of his family," he said.
For a publican who owned the Leinster Arms in Read's home suburb of Collingwood, he was just another regular.
"People took him as Chopper Read, he was just Mark to us," Glen McGee said.
Mr Ashby described one of his most notorious crimes, the attempted kidnapping of a County Court judge, as a stunt.
"He conducted a very doomed kidnapping in the courts which was a stunt, a sensational stunt, that he's paid a lot of time for."
But Mr Lay has not forgotten the armed robberies, kidnappings and assaults for which Read served 23 years in prison.
"There's lots been made about the last 20 years he's stayed out of trouble," Mr Lay said.
"Well, before that he'd done some pretty horrible things."
Read, who was immortalised in the film Chopper, leaves behind wife Margaret Cassar and sons Roy and Charlie.
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