Enforcer (23 page)

I thanked Sheepskin for coming round. We shook hands and they hopped in the car and took off. I got on the blower to Shadow and told him about it. I said, ‘I’m not gunna call a club meeting, I don’t want to worry the brothers any more than I have to, but you tell Snoddy what Sheepskin had to say.’

‘All right, Ceese, you watch your back.’

‘You do the same.’

***

T
HINGS WERE
building up and some of our blokes were getting restless. They didn’t like the fact that at any time you could be run off the road. After our next club meeting, Shadow, Snoddy and I had an officers’ meeting and we all agreed that if I could arrange it, I’d punch on with Leroy, or whoever they picked, and that the losing club would drop their colours. We knew that even if we won the fight, Jock wouldn’t stick to the agreement, but we knew Leroy would and he had a lot of influence.

So I went to front Jock at their clubhouse, but he wasn’t there. I spoke to Leroy and Sparra instead.

‘Let’s put an end to all this shit,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just punch on, you and me. You’ve always thought you could beat me, and I know I can beat you. The loser drops their colours.’

That stirred him right up like I knew it would.

‘I’ll take you on,’ he said.

‘There’ll just be me and you and one other bloke from each club.’

‘All right, I’ll put it up to Jock.’

‘Can’t ya make the decision yourself? You’re the sergeant-at-arms.’

‘The Comos aren’t run like you run the Bandits. I’ve gotta ask Jock.’

So he went away and got back to me a while later. Jock had said no way. It was guerilla warfare. And that was that.

B
Y THIS
time, a lot of members had stopped riding their bikes and wearing their colours. It was just too dangerous. But I always rode my Harley-Davidson Wide Glide and wore my deck. I wasn’t going to let anyone intimidate me. I was riding to the clubhouse the next Saturday with Donna on the back as usual, when we came down to the bay at Haberfield. As we approached the rowing club, I heard a couple of gunshots. A few moments later, I smelt petrol and felt a dampness on my leg.

I gunned the bike over a little bridge where the road went up the hill to Lilyfield, then pulled over. The right leg of my jeans was saturated in petrol. I looked at the tank and saw a bullet hole. It was a small calibre .22 or a .223. Luckily, I’d just filled up with petrol, so even though the bullet hit high up on the tank, it went through petrol. If I’d only had half a tank it would have gone through fumes and that would have been a lot more dangerous.

I leant the bike over and poured some petrol out of the tank onto the ground. Donna had some chewing gum which I stuck into the hole. ‘From now on we’ll have to go a different way to the clubhouse,’ I said, kicking myself because I should have known it was a dangerous spot to ride through at night, with the bay on one side and the park on the other.

We got back on and rode to the clubhouse, where I got the bike into the garage and had a good look over her. That’s when I got the biggest shock of the night – I found a bullet hole through the seat Donna had been sitting on. That freaked her out a bit and it wound me up something fierce.

I rode the bike home, grabbed an eight-shot pumpy, threw it in the boot of my old V8 XR Falcon and drove back to the clubhouse. I was spewing that they’d taken a shot at Donna. Dead set, if I’d run into any Como that night I would have blown his head off. Hang the consequences. If I’d run into six or seven of them, they were all going to the cemetery. And if there were fifteen and I had time to reload I would’ve done them too. If someone wants to go all the way with me, killing them doesn’t worry me one bit.

Back at the clubhouse, everyone was on a short fuse, especially now they knew the Comos didn’t give a fuck about whether your old ladies were with you or not. I said, ‘You blokes should have known that from when they put the diesel on the road.’

I grabbed Snoddy and Shadow and said, ‘I think a few of the fellas are losing a bit of heart. We’re going to have to do something to gee them up a bit.’ There were a few blokes who Snoddy and I thought were going to hand in their colours. He wanted to have a morale booster to make the blokes who were on the point of leaving think, ‘Nah, this is too good a club to leave.’

‘What if we bring the anniversary of the club forward?’ I said. The club had started on 22 November and it was now only August, but we’d been at the Louisa Road clubhouse for twelve months and I thought it would really pick the guys up to have something to celebrate.

Snoddy said it was a good idea, and Shadow agreed. They left it up to me to arrange for a big cake to be made with
Bandidos Australia First Anniversary
written across it
.

It worked a treat. When I brought the cake to the clubhouse the next meeting night and everyone saw it, they were rapt. Me and Snoddy held the knife together and cut the first slice. It was just what the brothers needed to lift their spirits. It had the right effect – although over time it created the mistaken idea that the club started in August 1983.

The real hard-core brothers in the club didn’t need a cake to pep them up. You only had to look in their eyes. They always had the same look; nothing fazed them. I think a few of my brothers were even enjoying the war. I said to Kid Rotten, ‘This is like an anniversary for you, it’s nearly a year since you changed your name from Animal to Kid Rotten.’

Kid said, ‘Well I didn’t want anything that reminded me that I was a Como. Animal was my Como name.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

I
N THE
next couple of weeks it got pretty hairy. With all the shooting going on I put some barbed wire round the front of my house, mainly so that if the Comos decided to turn up en masse there was something to slow them down while I got Donna and the kids out the back door or into the back room which I’d reinforced with sandbags.

Back in them days, outlaw clubs didn’t have guns around. There was a culture of stand-up toe-to-toe fighting. If you got thumped, you got thumped. People didn’t try to square up with guns. And in all the time I’d been riding, I’d never known of anyone from an outlaw club going to the coppers until Jock called them on us. Things have changed now. It’s gone from fists and knives to guns. And drive-bys on blokes’ homes have become the norm.

But all this was very unusual back in 1984. I only had that eight-shot pump-action shotgun because it had been offered to me at a good price. The only time I had ever had any reason to use it was when we went pig hunting. A couple of my brothers were right into the pig hunting. They’d go once every three months or so and I went with them a few times and just destroyed the pigs with this thing.

T
HE WAR
had been escalating through August. On the twenty-fourth, Wack drove his car past a Como house. He didn’t know it was a Como house, it was just a coincidence, but inside, someone recognised him. One of them followed Wack down to Shadow’s place and went back to get the others.

Three carloads pulled up – led by Jock’s brother-in-law, Glen Eaves – and let fly. There were bullets going through the front door and the windows. Shadow shot back and the Comos took off. Shadow and Wack then chased them through a few suburbs to someone’s house. Shadow and Wack pulled up and told the Condoms to get out, threatening to punch their heads in. With that the Comos let fly again and Shadow ended up with a few bullet holes in his car. He headed home and found his old lady in a real mess. The cops were there and wanted to know what had happened.

Shadow just told them a couple of cars had pulled up out the front and the blokes in them had started shooting. He said when they took off he chased them but stopped when they started shooting at his car. The cop went over and looked at Shadow’s car. ‘You’re mighty lucky.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Shadow said.

Shadow went inside and got on the blower to Snoddy and me. Snoddy was really upset because he and Shadow were as close as any two blokes could be. Snoddy called a special meeting and said that all this shit had to stop.

Afterwards, Mouth – the member whose vote I’d abstained from – called Snoddy, Shadow and me aside. Mouth said he’d been practising at the back of his property in Galston and reckoned he could put a bullet into the front wheel of a bike travelling at any speed. He suggested he take out Jock’s front wheel and bring him down.

It sounded okay to me. ‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s just Jock,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to go along with it if they’ve got their old ladies with ’em.’

‘Well they’ve been doing it to us,’ he said.

‘Just because they do it to us doesn’t mean we have to sink as low as them.’

Snoddy agreed. ‘If you can do it and there’s no old ladies or kids involved, have a go.’

But funnily, when Mouth got the go-ahead, he suddenly decided it was a bad idea. As usual, he was all piss and wind.

‘I don’t think I could kill anyone,’ he said.

‘You get over it,’ I said. ‘It’s only the first one that’s hard.’

B
ernie was round at my place one day. ‘You seemed really pissed off with Mouth, big fella,’ he said.

‘Well I never voted him into the club.’

I know you’re supposed to love all your brothers in the club, but when you think about it, that’s impossible. There’s blokes that are good for the club, but you also get plastic gangsters that slip through and get their colours. They just want to prance around with a ton of gold round their neck and a gold ring on every finger. I reckon if you pulled their boots off they’d have them on their toes, too.

Bernie asked Donna if he could talk to me in private so she went out the back.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’ve been hearing some rumours about how Jock came off his bike.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I heard Snoddy and a couple of other members ran him off the road in some sort of ute.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard the rumour too. But don’t you think if Snoddy had’ve done it he’d have got a semi, not a ute, and instead of sideswiping Jock he’d have run right over the top of him and turned him into porridge? I reckon it’s just another rumour started by the Comos.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’

I called Donna back inside and she said, ‘Can I say something to both of you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know, it’s not just me but all the old ladies in the club, we really worry about you guys. Like when you got run off the road, Ceese. When you came home I just saw the bike, and it reminded me of when John Boy got hit. I don’t want to lose you that way.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. It’d take a Mack truck to get rid of me.’

‘Why do you reckon Jock really started this war?’ Bernie asked.

I tossed it up but decided, Nah, I can’t tell him the real reason. Instead I said it was probably because Jock, Foghorn and Snowy were always used to being big fish in a small pond, and as the club had gotten bigger they felt like they were losing their importance. Which had certainly contributed to the tension within the Comos. But to me, that was just a creation of their own insecurities. As far as I was concerned, Jock was the president and that was the way it was always going to be. Unfortunately, with Foghorn and Snowy in his ear he’d got it into his head that I was after his job. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It had taken him four hours just to talk me into being sergeant.

Donna said to Bernie, ‘There were some really good times in the Comos.’

‘Yeah I heard that,’ Bernie said.

‘The times I loved best were the runs,’ she said. ‘And Christmas. You know, Caesar used to buy every member and their old ladies a present every year. And he was the only one who did it. And then this year, after they fed all those homeless kids, he did exactly the same thing for the Bandidos. He gave ’em all a special present. That’s how much the club and his brothers mean to Caesar.’

‘Come on, woman,’ I said. ‘You’re putting it on a bit thick.’

‘You’re always putting the club first,’ she said. ‘Like the way you’re always last one out of the pub, making sure the members and their old ladies are out and okay. And whenever there’s been a fight it’s always you, Bull, Shadow, Wack, Snake and Chop right up the front. Youse do it because you don’t want to see any of the brothers in the club get hurt. I’m getting a bit sick of you having to do everything for them.’

‘Calm down,’ I said.

She sat there and gave me a big smile. She knew she could wrap me round her little finger.

Donna went out to the kitchen while me and Bernie yakked on about our bikes and about Jock. Bernie and I had gotten pretty close after he came over from the Loners so I suppose he didn’t feel funny asking the next question: ‘Is it true what they say about you having a graveyard up in the Snowy Mountains?’

‘What makes you ask that?’

‘I’ve heard rumours since way back when I was a Loner, and since I’ve come over to the club, that when you were working for a bloke up the Cross you used to get rid of people by taking them down the Snowy.’

‘Well that’s for me to know and everyone else to find out.’