Enforcer (13 page)

Sheepskin introduced him around and when Kraut put out his hand to me, I just looked at him and walked off. Sheepskin wasn’t surprised because I don’t make friends real easy. I used to meet heaps of people and they’d get insulted. I wasn’t really trying to insult them but I can tell if I’m going to like someone just from watching them walk towards me. As soon as I saw Kraut, I thought, I’m gunna hate this bloke.

At first it was the posing, but then I was listening to him talk and when something came up about bikes he said he didn’t own a bike; he’d never even ridden one. I thought, Well what are you doing here then? Sheepskin saw me staring and came over: ‘You’ll get used to him.’

‘I don’t wanna get used to him.’

Apparently Kraut had been an explosives expert in the army, so Jock was straight up and arm around him. It was a done deal: Kraut bought himself a Triumph and before he could even ride it he became a nominee.

With around forty members by this stage, Jock was in his element. He’d even started referring to the club as his ‘army’. Then one night I received a phone call from him and he hit me with his latest idea. He wanted to form a group within the club called the Centurions, and he wanted me to head it up. The Centurions, he said, were to be his own personal bodyguards.

‘Who else is gunna be in the Centurions?’ I asked.

‘Just you and your brothers.’

He said that he’d picked us as the six best fighters in the club – me, Bull, Wack, Snake, Chop and Shadow – and that we would only be answerable to him.

It only took me a minute to decide. I didn’t like the idea. It would only cause trouble. I’d already seen the way Jock encouraged arguments between members – like he’d tried to do with me and Tonka at Molong – and I could see what would happen if we formed an elite group within the Comancheros. Jock would be geeing the rest of the blokes up about us, then he’d be telling us what the other members were up to. So I knocked him back.

But Jock wasn’t going to be put off the idea of a personal bodyguard. After I turned him down, Jock approached Sheepskin with the same idea. Only this time it wasn’t to be called the Centurions, it was to be called the Strike Force. And unlike me, Sheepskin said yes.

So Sheepskin was to be sergeant of the Strike Force, while I remained sergeant of the Comancheros. Jock spelt out that this meant Sheepskin could only tell the Strike Force what to do, and not anyone else in the club, while I could tell the rest of the club what to do, but not the Strike Force. It all seemed a bit stupid to me. If I thought the Strike Force was getting out of line or prancing round the club like their shit didn’t stink, I was going to tell them to pull their heads in. Fortunately, Sheepskin and I remained good mates so I knew I wouldn’t get any grief from him.

Jock announced the other members of the Strike Force, who naturally included Foghorn and Snowy, as well as his new best friend Kraut, even though he was still a nom. Then there was Sparra, Tiger, Tonka and JJ. JJ was another bloke I didn’t have any time for. As a nominee he was the nicest bloke you could want to meet, but once he got his colours he was a different man. Shadow and I rocked up to his place one day about two weeks after he’d been patched. We could hear all this whimpering coming from out the back. The front door was open so we walked through. JJ had a couple of bull terrier cross cattle dogs, and his bitch had just had pups. When we got out to the backyard, we found this row of tiny pups, only three or four weeks old, nailed through their throats to the fence. JJ was just hammering in the last pup. Shadow lost it. He grabbed JJ and kicked the living shit out of him. ‘You can bring me up at the next meeting, but you’re the lowest cunt I’ve ever seen.’ I don’t think me and Shadow ever spoke a word to JJ again.

And that was the sort of bloke Jock wanted in his Strike Force.

As predicted, the formation of the Strike Force didn’t go down well. In fact, it was the start of a whole lot of trouble.

W
e were at a club meeting one night when Jock announced that he was going to start drilling us for future fights. He said there was an old army manoeuvre where you had one lot of troops at the front line, and a back line that would come in to relieve them. I knew where he’d got it from. It was from back in the days of the old one-shot rifles. You’d have one line of blokes at the front and once they’d fired, the group standing behind them would step forward to fire while the first group reloaded. Jock had reinterpreted this to apply to brawling. He figured we’d have one lot of blokes in the front line who’d take the brunt of the fight, and then a second lot of blokes that would come in to give the first line a breather. He started taking us through regular drills so we could perfect the manoeuvre. He’d stand out the front and raise his hand: ‘Forward!’ And the front line, full of his best fighters, would step forward. Then he’d point backwards and bark: ‘Back!’ And the front line would part to allow the second line to step through.

It was pathetic. Anyone could see it was just never going to work. It might work if you were fighting in a park or a paddock and you could line everyone up,
and
if the opposition was willing to do the same thing and line their lot up. But in a pub situation? I’d been in that many pub brawls, fighting with my old man since I was twelve, and once a fight started you didn’t know where anyone was. People were all over the place. Jock just didn’t understand.

As it turned out he never even tried to put it into action. He couldn’t. Pub brawls had a life of their own. All that the drills achieved was to reinforce my suspicions about Jock and his military obsession. One Saturday night he walked into the clubhouse and declared, ‘El Supremo has arrived. From now on I shall be referred to as the Supreme Commander.’ Blokes just looked at each other.

The rest of us, outside the Strike Force, only wanted to ride our bikes, have fun and look after each other. But Jock managed to turn everything into a war game. Like one run we took out to Lithgow. We’d set up a bush camp with a big bonfire, the bikes all parked in tight around the fire. It was a dark night and Jock decided we’d play one of his games with members versus nominees. He put me in charge of the noms. Jock’s game had the members going out in the bush to hide, while the nominees defended the bikes. If one member could sneak in and touch a bike, Jock’s group won the war. But if we caught the members out before anyone got to a bike, then we won.

So the members all went out into the bush. I kept a few noms round the bikes, and sent the rest out just as far as the scrub, so that any member trying to sneak in couldn’t see them. One nominee, Pommy, who was considered by everyone to be hopeless, climbed a tree just outside the light from the fire to act as a lookout.

It wasn’t long before I heard Pommy’s voice: ‘You’re dead, Jock.’

The nominee considered the worst bloke in the club had taken the first prisoner, and it was El Supremo.

After that we got member after member coming in and we’d tag them. The game dragged on for ages until we heard a strange car coming down the dirt track towards the bonfire. I watched it approach, and as it was coming I could see the boot bouncing a little. So I grabbed a few of the noms. ‘When this car pulls up, rip open the boot.’

The car pulled up and it had a straight in it: ‘Oh, I saw the fire so I thought I’d drive down.’ The nominees ripped up the boot and there were John Boy and Roger. They’d walked all the way up to the road, hailed down the car and conned the bloke into driving down to the campfire with them in the boot. Their plan had been to jump out and touch one of the bikes. Too bad.

After about three hours, there were still four members out in the darkness who hadn’t been caught, and weren’t going to get caught because they weren’t moving, so I declared game over and we got back to the business of partying. All except Jock, who spent the rest of the night pissed off that he was the first prisoner caught.

The other thing Jock tried to do was introduce a compulsory all-black dress code for the club. I always wore black anyway, so that didn’t bother me, but he wanted us in the high, black Nazi boots and black helmets with Comanchero colours painted on the side. You didn’t even have to wear helmets in those days.

The pathetic thing about Jock’s war mentality, though, was that his credentials didn’t even back him up. When I’d first met him, and many times since then, we’d sat around tables with him telling his SAS stories of head-chopping derring-do. Turned out it was all crap. One day me and Snoddy were over at his house and Jock’s missus, Vanessa, brought out the photo albums of his army days. Here was Jock putting up a fence, here he was building a bridge. Snoddy and I looked at each other. ‘What’s Jock doing?’

‘That was his job in the army,’ Vanessa said. ‘He was a sapper. An engineer.’

‘Not in the SAS?’

‘Nah.’

A
ROUND THIS
time we were having trouble with the Warlocks. Someone had said something they shouldn’t have at a pub one night and so Jock declared war on them.
One Comanchero in, all Comancheros in
.

It took us a while to track them down because they kept moving from spot to spot. But one night Snowy from the Strike Force came to a meeting and said he’d located the Warlock’s clubhouse at Mount Druitt and checked it out.

Jock decided we’d hit them there. Snowy wanted to be the first one in, since he’d found the clubhouse. We all agreed, and Jock decided he would stay out of it since he was too valuable to go on the hit. Evidently anyone else in the club was replaceable.

We sussed out the Warlocks’ clubhouse beforehand. It was just an ordinary-looking house, but Snowy assured us it was the real deal. ‘Give me the gun,’ he demanded.

The hit went down with Snowy in first, armed with a pistol, and Roach as back-up. The rest of us were watching from cars. We saw one of the Warlocks open the front door, and as soon as he saw a couple of Comos standing there he grabbed a sawn-off shotgun. Snowy froze.

Seconds dragged on as we watched Snowy just standing there, not moving. Fortunately Roach pushed Snowy out of the way and dived on the Warlock with the shotty, and we all headed for the house. By the time we got there, Roach was on the ground wrestling with a couple of Warlocks. Our blokes started smashing the shit out of them. It wasn’t hard. There was eight of us and only four of them.

We later found out that it wasn’t even the Warlocks’ clubhouse, just a house belonging to one of their members. We had a rule in the Comos, which I’d brought in, that you never hit a person’s home. You could hit a clubhouse, you could hit someone in the street or in the pub, but under no circumstances could you go to their house. You just didn’t know if their old lady or kids would be there. I was filthy, as was most of the club. But Jock and the Strike Force regarded the hit on the Warlocks as a great victory.

***

N
OT LONG
after, we went on a run down to Batemans Bay on the south coast. We met a couple of sheilas down there and most of the club went through them. One member, Lard, became quite friendly with one of them and stayed in contact with her after we’d returned home.

Next thing the rest of us knew, we were at a club meeting and Jock was wanting to go to war with the Rebels.

‘What? Whaddya wanna go to war with the Rebels for?’

‘I’ve got my reasons.’

‘We can’t go to war unless we know the reason.’

After hours of arguing Jock finally told us. It seemed that two weeks after we’d been to Batemans Bay, the Rebels had turned up down there and met the same pair of sheilas. Same thing happened as with us, apparently. They had a good time together. But the sheilas rang Lard and told him that the Rebels had carved into a table:

Comancheros suck
Rebels rule

And that was it. That was Jock’s big reason for wanting to declare war.

‘You gotta be joking if you wanna go to war for that,’ I said.

‘We can’t let them get away with that,’ he said.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’ll go and have a word with the president of the Rebels and see what he has to say about it.’

Jock wasn’t real happy with this but the rest of the club, barring the Strike Force, voted in favour of it.

So I met the president and sergeant of the Rebels out at Leppington. We discussed the matter and the president told me they’d had trouble with the two sheilas, that it looked like a case of revenge. ‘So you want to go to war over a couple of sluts?’

‘No, the club doesn’t, but Jock does.’

‘Why isn’t Jock here fronting me himself then? He’s your president, isn’t he? I’m here as the president of my club, why isn’t he?’

‘Well I’m the sergeant and this is what I do for the Comos.’ Jock didn’t believe in meeting with other people.

The president of the Rebels gave me his word that what the sheilas had said was bullshit. We shook hands and at the next club meeting I relayed what had happened. They all voted not to go to war. Jock wasn’t real happy about it but he was bound by the vote.

Later on, though, Shadow, Snoddy and me overheard Jock talking to Kraut about dynamite and the Rebels’ clubhouse. We fronted them and it came out that, in spite of my mediation talks with the Rebels, Jock had twice sent Kraut to size up the Rebels’ clubhouse. He wanted Kraut to work out how much dynamite it would take to blow it up, and was talking about doing it on a meeting night or even a club night, whichever he figured would get the most members. If it had been a club night he would have got old ladies, too. People who were just there to party. But Jock didn’t care.