Enforcer (29 page)

I don’t ever forget and I always get even no matter how long it takes. She knew me better than anyone and she knew the things I’d do to even up, but she was worried that my back was becoming infected. I had four big, painful lumps back there. They were getting that bad I had to lie on my stomach or my side. It felt like the slugs were just under the skin and if you nicked them with a razor blade they might just pop out.

So Donna, being an ex-nurse, decided that they had to go. And being my wife and best friend I knew there was no one better to do it. She’d done it years earlier with the .22 bullet and we didn’t think this would be any harder. So she went to the Hill Top shopping centre, bought some Dettol, Gem razor blades, sutures to stitch me up, antibiotic powder, and a needle. Then she went to the bottle shop for a cask of wine to steady her nerves.

The next afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table, which Donna had rubbed down with Dettol. She took my singlet off, put towels under the chair and on the floor. Luckily it was a tiled floor.

As she cut into the first lump, I gripped the table with my left arm. I could feel the skin peeling apart as the blade cut down. She took a sip of wine to calm herself. She said it was much harder doing this on someone she loved than just any patient in a hospital. She cut down further and hit a blob of gunk. She stopped and got it all out. ‘That’s what I’ve found,’ she said, depositing the blob of green jelly on the table. ‘Do you want me to go further?’ We’d never seen anything like this stuff. It wasn’t pus.

‘Seeing you’ve opened it up you might as well keep going,’ I said.

She took another swig and cut some more, then more swigs and more cuts while I gripped the table with my good arm. As she went deeper, it became hard for her to keep the skin apart with all the blood getting in the way. But she kept on slicing down until at last – about two inches under the skin, she hit metal. Only it wasn’t a straightforward lump of lead. This thing had grown into a ball of gristle.

By now I could see blood running off my back onto my sides and down to the floor.

‘Do you want me to keep going?’ she said. ‘Because I can’t reach it with the razor. I’ll have to use your buck knife.’

‘Go for it,’ I said.

Donna held the little blade over a flame, then splashed it with Dettol and in she went.

That’s when the pain really kicked in and the blood flowed as she tried to pry this thing out. The four-inch blade was halfway in as she cut around the gristle until, pop, she had it out. It turned out to be an SG 00 from a twelve-gauge shotgun.

That done, Donna started on the second one – cutting it open, squeezing out the green stuff, digging out the slug with the buck knife and the razor, then stopping the bleeding and filling it up with antibiotic powder, before sewing it all together.

Two hours later, she was stitching up the fourth one, and I’d just about had it. The pain was exhausting. She helped me into bed.

‘I don’t know how you did it,’ she said. ‘I was shaking and felt like screaming, but you didn’t make a sound.’

‘Don’t worry, I wanted to,’ I said.

I lay there on my stomach and did my best to get some sleep while Donna did her best to clean up the blood from the floor and the table. It took her more than half a day.

A day later, though, I was still bleeding, so she opened me up again and stitched me back up afresh. This time the bleeding stopped and the wound healed without even a tiny bit of infection. Donna was still getting all my antibiotics from her multiple doctor visits. She was one sick woman.

A
s I started to recover I began to think about forming another chapter of the Bandidos. I wanted a bunch of blokes out there that would do anything to defend the club’s name. Almost all the blokes I’d been riding with were locked up. And I didn’t trust Mouth. So ever since I’d heard about the Griffith chapter, I’d been thinking about getting my own going.

I would kick it off with a couple of prospects and I would be president. I could’ve started the chapter by myself but I wanted to do it properly. I’d never used the fact I was sergeant-at-arms – or that I’d worn the first set of colours in Australia – to get my way. I always went along with what the majority of the club voted, even if I didn’t like it. So I sent my brother Wheels to Parklea to ask Snoddy if it was all right with him.

Snoddy knew I wasn’t too happy about the Griffith chapter being patched up so he gave me the go ahead.

One of the first blokes I got in was Sheepskin. He’d been ringing me ever since he left the Comos in the weeks before the ambush. And when I was in hospital he sent cards. Donna said that he also rocked up each week to check she was all right. He’d said to her, ‘Tell Ceese if there’s anything I can do for him, or if there’s anyone he wants taken care of, I’ll do it.’ So there was him, plus my former brother-in-law, Lurch, who’d been a Gladiator, my brother Wheels and my mates Pancho, who was an ex-Hells Angel, and Russell. Roach joined up from jail and later Sparksy and my brother Snake came over too.

During this time, I was talking to the president and sergeant-at-arms of an outlaw club in Victoria. The sergeant had been a big help in letting me know what was going on. Like, he told me how they were at a party with the Griffith Bandidos and Mouth was there telling everyone how he’d been to the States to see the Bandidos over there. And how when the Bandido from the States had come out to see how we were going, the only Bandido he saw was him – implying that he, Mouth, was the main man and that Snoddy and I didn’t count any more. The other club thought it was a bit funny that he would be discussing club business and running down other members in front of everyone.

After checking around, I found out where Mouth was living and got a phone number. I rang him and told him, ‘You go round bad-mouthing me to anyone, I’ll rip your colours off your back. Not just for bad-mouthing me, but if you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing you’re a bigger arsehole than what you look.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I know you’ve been rooting Joanne. I know you did it not long after Shadow was buried. I also know you’re rooting ______ [another member’s old lady] too while her fella’s locked up. You were supposed to be really tight with the bloke.’

Mouth denied it.

‘You can deny it all you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve got people out there who know. So you’ve got two choices. I come round your place and take your colours, or you hand them in.’

Mouth just disappeared after that. As far as I’m concerned he stopped being a Bandido that day. No one has seen him round the club since.

I
T WAS
28 April 1985, almost eight months after the ambush. Donna and I were watching the news, but I wish I hadn’t been. It came up that the president of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, Anthony ‘Snoddy’ Spencer, had committed suicide in Parklea prison.

After about an hour of just sitting there blankly in front of the box, Donna said, ‘Why do you think he did it?’

I thought there were probably a couple of reasons. He probably blamed himself for Shadow and Chop’s deaths and having the club end up where it did. And he wasn’t stupid, he knew what had happened to Shadow’s old lady. That would have added to his torment.

I wish he hadn’t done it. Snoddy gave up his life when he had it there to live. I had two brothers who died for the club. I was pissed off with Snoddy for doing what he did, but then again, I’d never been to jail so I couldn’t understand what was going through his brain. I just wish he’d have waited.

I had got word to him that I was eventually going to hand myself in. I knew my duty was to be inside with my brothers so I could take care of them. But I didn’t want to go to jail until my arm was strong enough for me to look after myself. I wasn’t going to put myself at the mercy of halfwit standover men inside. I know if I’d been there with him he probably wouldn’t have done it. But as the old saying goes, shit happens.

A
FEW
weeks after Snoddy’s death, Donna went to the little shopping centre in Hill Top to buy some hot chips when, wouldn’t you know it, she ran into someone who knew us – Bushy. He was an original Bandido who had left the club when the war got too hot. She came back and told me, all upset that he might ring the cops.

‘I don’t reckon he will,’ I said.

‘But you never know.’

I knew Bushy wouldn’t have handed me in, but I knew that he would probably tell someone and they’d probably tell someone else, and word would eventually get out. While I wasn’t trying too hard to avoid the law, it didn’t mean I wanted to get caught. So next thing I knew, Donna was on the blower to Pancho and Cheryl, who had just moved to Perth. We decided we’d move there too – immediately. Just a day or two earlier, one of my brothers had given us an XC 351 Ford panel van to use in case of an emergency. We threw as much stuff into it as Donna could manage, plus one of our three dogs, and within the hour we were ready to go. Chane was with us and it was a tearful goodbye, leaving him behind.

Donna couldn’t drive then so I had to do it all. We slept in the car – the two adults, two kids, the dog Buck and all the gear. You could never get comfortable with a fan sticking in your ribs or someone else squirming about. Donna was still bottle feeding Lacey. It was a tough trip, so monotonous, but we did it in four and a half days. We arrived at Bayswater, Perth, where Cheryl was waiting for us and we followed her back to their place. Our friends put us up for about three weeks, then we rented a place a few blocks away at Shakespeare Street, Mount Hawthorn. We signed the lease in my name. We enrolled Daniel in school. Donna got a job in the classifieds department at the
Western Mail
newspaper. She used to work at the
Telegraph
in Sydney so she knew her stuff, and after only about three weeks there they made her a supervisor and later a manager.

It was still my intention to hand myself in when I got strong enough. Pancho came around just about every day to help me train so I could get the muscle back in my right arm, which was still a withered mess.

J
UST BEFORE
Christmas 1985, thirteen months after the committal hearing had begun, it finished with forty Bandits and Comos committed to stand trial for murder. Only two of the forty-two who’d been charged weren’t sent for trial – Snoddy and my brother Wack.

Wack had been crook ever since Milperra. After all the surgeries and everything he just never recovered.

They still put him in Parklea, but for about six or seven months he complained of chest pains and not feeling right. They only had nurses on there most of the time; a doctor came in once a fortnight or something. He was looking about eighty years old and way past his use-by date. The nurse kept telling Wack that he just had bronchitis. Finally he got so crook they sent him into Prince Henry Hospital and he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. His heart was swelling and getting too big for his chest. The specialist told him that if he’d come in six months earlier he would’ve been able to do something. He was put on the waiting list for a heart transplant and was positioned near the top of the list. But then one day he rocked up at the hospital with a Bandidos T-shirt on, and a couple of the nurses said, ‘Oh, you’re one of those blokes from Milperra, are you?’

‘Yeah.’

The next thing we knew he’d been dropped down the waiting list.

There hadn’t been much in the Perth papers about the committal hearing so I didn’t know a lot about it. Even so, I was surprised that the Bandits didn’t get off. I thought the Comos would go down because they’d turned up with shotguns and waited for us with walkietalkies and the whole lot. They’d obviously come there with the intention of committing a crime. We’d gone there with the intention of buying some bike parts and watching a band. I mean, did the magistrate honestly think that we’d gone there to shoot up all these people with the plan of then turning round to ride back to my young fella’s birthday party, where ten cars could pull up in the street straight alongside our backyard and empty as many shotguns as they wanted into our women and children?

Suddenly, it looked like the club was going to go to jail for a long time. Snoddy was dead. I started to feel weak that I was out while they were all inside. We needed to keep the guys strong and together. They needed a leader.

My arm was still a long way off being any good for fighting, but, being big-headed, I figured I was better with one arm than most blokes with two, so I decided I was going to hand myself in.

I talked it over with Donna then got my mum and my sister, Patricia, to get me a QC. Patricia put me on to Dr Greg Woods. I’d heard of him, so I agreed with that. I spoke to him and we made arrangements that I’d come back, meet him and hand myself in. We started trying to arrange for a place for Donna and the kids to stay in Sydney.

It was a stinking hot summer in Perth. One afternoon, a few days after we started making plans to come back, I was out on the front verandah, watching my bull terrier Buck run around and do his business.

Unbeknown to me, a bloke had broken out of the Perth lock-up that day and as it happened his parents lived in the same street as us. So three or four blokes from the Consorting Squad decided to pay his parents a visit. The only cops in Western Australia who had a photo of me just happened to be the Consorting Squad. They drove right by and nothing happened.