Enforcer (28 page)

‘That’s just the way it is, Wack. That’s the way we were brought up. It’s just a pity that the tavern had to happen for us to find out who was who.’

‘You’re not wrong. Some of those blokes would’ve won a medal in the hundred-metre sprint they were that fast getting out of there.’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I said.

T
HE NEXT
day a couple of coppers came into the room. ‘All of your mates have been busted for what happened out at Milperra.’

‘Whaddya mean?’ Wack asked.

‘They’ve all been charged,’ the senior copper said.

‘With what?’ Wack wanted to know.

‘Ah, I can’t tell you that.’

Later that night Donna came up and filled us in on what had gone down. ‘They raided all the houses and busted all the blokes in the club,’ she said. ‘They even raided our place.’

‘What’d they raid our place for?’

‘They said they were looking for you.’

‘Looking for me? What a load of bull.’

She said she opened the door and the coppers started pulling down all the barbed wire I’d put across the gate to the front verandah. She couldn’t believe it when they claimed they were searching for me. She looked at the bloke who was doing all the talking, and said, ‘He’s in Bankstown Hospital. You’ve got two or three blokes watching him all day. Make a phone call.’ But the cops just wanted an excuse to go through the place. They went in and stole whatever they wanted. She told us how they took her leather jeans, my jacket and vest, all the photo albums, all my karate and wrestling trophies. ‘Three-quarters of our stuff is missing,’ she said.

After Lard’s mum and my sisters had left for the night, she said to me, ‘You know all that money we had?’

‘Yeah?’

‘That’s gone too.’

‘Fuckin’ great.’

‘Yeah, every penny we had to buy the property at Bowral.’

She said a lot of the old ladies had got together to try and figure out what to do. Shadow’s old lady Joanne was there too. ‘And there’s Joanne dolling herself up,’ Donna told me. ‘And I said to her, “Whaddya think you’re doing?” And she goes, “Going out. I’ve got to take my mind off all this.” And I said to her, “What about the rest of us? You don’t see us running about.” She just walked out and hopped into a car. You know who she went with?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘And then they were gone.’

‘I’d hate to think what Shadow’s thinking up there . . . Did they find the jar of fingers?’ I asked. It was going to be tricky explaining the digits and the odd eyeball I had in the doghouse along with some of my tools.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Get rid of it.’

So she got one of the blokes who was still out to help her. They dumped it all in the river.

L
ARD HAD
been watching the coppers. He’d noticed that every morning, about eight o’clock, all nine of them went to the little room at the end of the corridor for breakfast and usually stayed there for forty-five minutes. He’d timed them over a couple of weeks.

He’d also noticed a copper out on the verandah having a smoke one day. We didn’t have a door onto the verandah, but Lard opened up the huge floor-to-ceiling windows which were as good as a door, and hobbled out on his crutches to talk to this constable.

‘Where’s that door at the end of the balcony go?’ he asked.

‘I dunno,’ the copper said. ‘Hang on, I’ll have a look.’ So the copper walked down to the end of the balcony, went through the door and came back. ‘There’s a set of stairs that takes you down into the garden.’

‘Oh really,’ said Lard, all casual.

Lard came back inside. ‘Well if we ever want to escape we just found the way.’

Escape had been a long way from our minds at that point, but pretty soon after this, we heard that the coppers were going to start holding bedside courts. Bandidos had already been charged with affray and offensive behaviour after the ambush. Then there’d been the raids when more got arrested and they started charging them all with murder. They’d already held bedside courts for Jock and a few other Comancheros who were in a different hospital. And there were more arrests a few days after that. So by early October, forty blokes from both clubs had been arrested, charged with murder and locked up. Except for a couple of blokes like Bernie, who was hiding out, the only blokes who hadn’t been charged were us four in Bankstown Hospital. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out what we could be arrested for, given that we’d been ambushed and were only acting in self-defence. But the cops seemed to be doing it anyhow.

I thought, Well I’m not going to jail. I haven’t done anything wrong. All I did was ride into a car park, try to get some cocksucking wimps to put their guns down and then got shot. Now these coppers wanted to charge me for it. And no fuckin’ way was I going to jail in the condition I was in. I could hardly move.

So I said to Lard, ‘You know that way you found of getting out of here?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well I think I’m gunna take it. Any of youse wanna come?’

‘Nuh, I wouldn’t make it,’ Porky said.

Lard and Wack both said no too. I think they were pretty confident they’d beat any charges that were brought against them.

‘If you want me to stay,’ I said, ‘I will. But if it’s all right with you fellas, I’m gunna leave.’

‘Go for it,’ Lard said.

I told Donna that when she came back to visit me that night she should bring up some trackies, thongs and a top. ‘Tomorrow, I’m gunna pull all the drips out and I’m gunna go out that window.’ I told her to meet me the next morning at eight at the end of the verandah. She stuck her head out the window and saw the door. I said, ‘When you’re leaving, go down to the grounds out there, walk up the stairs, push the door open and make sure you can see the window here.’

‘All right,’ she said.

So at eight o’clock next morning, when the cops had gone for breakfast, I pulled the drips out of my arms and the tubes out of the side of my chest. I struggled into the trackies and the top.

‘D’ya think you’ll make it?’ Lard asked.

‘I’ve got to make it,’ I said, wishing them all the best. ‘Don’t worry, as soon as I can look after myself I’ll be seeing youse.’ I lifted up the window, hopped out of it, and there at the end of the verandah I could see the door. It was only about twenty metres away but it seemed like five miles. It was the first time I’d walked since the Viking Tavern and my legs were jelly. I finally got to the door, opened it and there she was. The woman – wearing a beanie and a jacket. She helped me down the stairs and across the garden. I tried to walk as upright as possible as we went past a gardener. My mate Pancho was waiting in his Falcon. I got in the back and lay down on pillows they’d brought for me. They covered me with a blanket and drove me to Pancho’s place up the back of Mount Druitt in Sydney’s outer west.

Just hours after I got away, Lard, Porky and Wack were each charged with seven counts of murder.

T
he day I got away from the hospital, the coppers were at pains to tell the press that I hadn’t actually escaped. ‘We want to stress that Colin Campbell was not under police guard himself,’ they said. ‘He had not been charged with anything and was perfectly entitled to sign himself out of hospital as he did. The police guard at Bankstown Hospital is for the safety and security of patients and staff.’ Could have fooled me.

They tried to scare Donna by telling the papers that if I didn’t get medical help I’d probably die; that I could only get the strength of antibiotic I needed in hospital. There was probably a bit of truth in it, but I wasn’t going back. I was not going to go to jail for being the victim of an ambush that had killed my brothers.

Pancho and his missus, Cheryl, had set up a room for me with a double mattress and air conditioning that could point straight at me. I was still running the huge fever. Donna and Cheryl went from doctor to doctor all over Sydney complaining of infections, sore throats, coughing and spluttering, dizzy spells and pleurisy to get antibiotics for me.

They should have won Oscars for their performances. They just kept getting those pills, whatever type they could get hold of, and shovelled them into me. I was doing about twenty-five pills a day.

I might have been on the run, but we weren’t really hiding too hard. My eldest sons Chane and Lee would visit me a couple of times a week. My brother Wheels kept in touch over the phone. That’s how I found out that a Bandit from the States had come out to try and see either Snoddy or myself. But Mouth – who was one of the few Bandits who was free because of his mystery illness on the day of the ambush – had met the American and told him there was no way he could talk to us because it was too dangerous to meet me or go into Parklea jail where Snoddy and the others had been locked up. So we never got to see this Bandido. Mouth kept the guy away from everyone.

Snoddy smuggled a letter out of Parklea to me, telling me that Mouth wanted to make all the blokes from Griffith members – patching them straight away with no prospect time. I didn’t like the idea. I only knew the names of about four of those blokes and I’d only met them once when they’d come to a party at the clubhouse in Balmain. But with Mouth putting the pressure on Snoddy, and me not being able to see him, Snoddy agreed to patch them. The concession I got from Snoddy was that if I wanted to start a chapter some time down the track, I could.

***

T
WENTY-FIVE DAYS
after I escaped, we heard that Bernie had been arrested. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t be staunch like all the other blokes had been. The closest the cops had got to getting a statement out of any of us was when Big Tony got arrested. He’d been on the run a few months when he’d put an ad in the paper trying to sell his car. Somehow the coppers knew it was him and these two blokes turned up to buy the car and wanted to go for a test drive. So Tony took them for a spin and all of a sudden cop cars turned up from everywhere blocking their path and one of these blokes pulled a gun and put it to Tony’s head: ‘You’re under arrest.’ Tony turned around and said, ‘I s’pose this means you don’t wanna buy the car.’

They had Kid Rotten in the cop shop for hour after hour, threatening him with everything if he didn’t make a statement. He refused. They did that to everyone to some extent: ‘You’re gunna go to jail for life. You’re gunna lose your family.’ But no one had given a statement or signed anything. Unlike the Comos.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when the committal hearing started – two weeks after Bernie’s capture – and on the second day they rolled out Bernie as the star witness. He’d done a deal with the prosecution. He spent days on the stand telling them everything he knew. He confirmed to the court that we weren’t armed, and that we were all going back to Daniel’s birthday party afterwards, but he threw in some wobblies as well.

I was getting messages from my brother Wheels – who wasn’t a Bandido at that time but would later join – who was going to the hearing each day at Penrith court. Wheels rang me one night and said that Bernie had been asked what he thought of me.

Wheels explained, ‘He started off making you sound like you weren’t a bad bloke. Like, he said you always kept the peace within the club, and he said you kept the peace between our club and other clubs.’ According to Wheels, Bernie said I never went looking for fights, but that if there was a fight on I always finished them. And that I made it my job to make sure no member in the club got hurt. Which all sounded good, but then Bernie turned round out of the blue and told the magistrate, ‘Oh, but Caesar’s got a secret graveyard down in the Snowy Mountains.’

Wheels said the magistrate, Greg Glass, looked at Bernie a bit surprised and Bernie blurted out, ‘Caesar is a contract killer on the side.’ I don’t know where he got that idea from, but it went into the court records, which I wasn’t too happy about.

W
E’D BEEN
staying at Pancho and Cheryl’s place for a while and I didn’t want to get them into shit if the coppers found me. So in early 1985 I asked Pancho to find me a place somewhere down near Bowral in the Southern Highlands south of Sydney. It was still close to my family, and Donna would have people around who could help her. So he found a joint at Hill Top and it turned out to be a nice little place. He got my dogs for me and brought them down. And that’s what I mean when I say the cops mustn’t have tried very hard to find me. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t on the run. I’d done nothing wrong. We rented this place in my name. Donna was on the pension in the name of Donna Campbell. She’d go into Mittagong to do the shopping, and come back in a taxi. All they had to do was check where she was picking up her pension, or check the realestate agents. I could’ve found myself in a week.

My son Lee, who was then fourteen and a half, used to come down to visit for weeks at a time. He’d do the cloak-and-dagger thing, catching a few different buses then the train, and we’d have someone pick him up at Bowral.

We went though some hard times at Hill Top. Donna was carrying the world on her back. And being out of the city, it was much harder to find different doctors for her antibiotics performances. Here I was, flat on my back, for the first time counting on someone else to look out for me. It had always been the other way around – I looked out for everyone else. My whole right side was fucked, my right lung had four big holes in it. I could not lift my arm for months. All I could do was lie on the bed. But with Donna’s help I started to get the arm working. She put a small tin of baked beans in a plastic bag which I used to do arm curls. Over time, I worked my way up to a big Coke bottle. All the time I knew she was worrying that I was trying too hard. She also knew what I had on my mind.