Enforcer (8 page)

‘How do you expect him to bring back five cases of beer on his bike?’ I asked Bull.

‘He’s a nom,’ said Bull. ‘He’ll find a way.’

So Mad Dog headed off. A bit over an hour later, we heard this dirty great screeching noise coming down the road. Here’s Mad Dog with a piece of rope running off the back of his bike dragging an upturned car bonnet behind him with the five cases of beer on it. He’d gone into a car yard near the bottle-o, undone the bonnet of one of the cars, loaded the beer then dragged it all the way down the Hume Highway. Only problem was he’d left a whopping great scratch mark on the road leading straight to Bull’s driveway.

We unloaded the beer, then Bull and Mad Dog reloaded the bonnet with bricks and half a sleeper to weigh it down. Mad Dog headed back up the street, through the main shopping centre of Ashfield, over to Summer Hill, and down to the railway line, extending the scratch mark through several suburbs to put any coppers off the scent. Satisfied he’d created enough confusion he retrieved his rope and zotted back to Bull’s.

A week later, we were down the Empire Hotel at Annandale and there was a fair-sized bloke in there with a real nice blonde. Mad Dog went up and was trying to crack onto the blonde. The bloke told him to piss off, but Mad Dog looked over at me and Lurch and said something to the bloke. The bloke looked at me and Lurch. You could see he wanted to smash Mad Dog but he wasn’t going to take us on. I said to Lurch, ‘Let’s go and stand round behind the partition where they can’t see us.’

So we moved behind the partition, but Mad Dog didn’t see us go, and he was still yak-yak-yakking on to this sheila. He turned and said something to the bloke, then looked over his shoulder only to see we’d gone. He hit the toe and was out of the pub.

At the next meeting I said to Bull, ‘Mad Dog’s just never gunna make it. If youse want him to hang round to do the dirty work, watch the bikes and go for food and that sort of stuff, you’re really not doing him a service because he’s gunna think he’ll eventually get in, and he’s never gunna get in.’

My brothers might have been looking for fighters, but one thing I judged people on was that if you picked a fight, you had to back it up. If anyone hanging round the club was the sort of bloke who walked into a pub looking for a fight only because he had the back-up of the rest of the club, I’d get rid of him. Those blokes are nothing but trouble.

I
WAS
out for a ride when I saw these four blokes pull over an old fella driving an FB Holden. The four blokes were slapping him round the car so I pulled over and started smashing them. One of them got me a beauty in the kidneys with a baseball bat before I managed to drop them all. My back was aching as I turned to the old fella, ‘Are you all right?’

He said, ‘Bikie scum.’

Nice.

If I’d been wearing a suit the old fella would probably have thought I was the greatest bloke in the world. But because I had my cut-off on and the tatts, and my long hair and bandana, I was the bad guy.

I got back to the bike, and it took a young sheila of about eighteen to help me lift my leg over the bike. That’s how bad my back was. When I got home Donna had to come out and help me off the bike. I ended up in the hospital; I was pissing blood, the whole bit.

***

F
OR FOUR
or five weeks, everywhere I went people were telling me that the Hells Angels were looking for me. I was riding down Parramatta Road at Annandale with Donna when I saw some bikes with death heads on them parked outside the Empire Hotel. I’m not one to run from a fight so I pulled in and we went upstairs to the lounge.

There was this big bloke playing pool, his vest slung over a chair. On its back were the words
Hells Angels Sydney
. He put his vest on and introduced himself as Guitar. He knew who I was. We started talking and as usual it turned out only to be rumours of any trouble between our clubs. He brought over five of his brothers and we chatted for about twenty minutes before I left.

A couple of nights later I was sitting at the bar of the James Craig Tavern at Birkenhead Point when Guitar walked through the doors. Bull and Chop grabbed him and were about to punch him when Guitar called out to me. I told them to let him go.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

‘Me old lady has just started work in the kitchen,’ he said.

I got Shadow to hop the bar and go out to the kitchen. Sure enough, Guitar’s old lady Joan was working there, so I said, ‘That’s fair enough, you can come here anytime you want. D’ya want a drink?’

‘Yeah, I’ll have a Jim Beam,’ he said. ‘Whadda you want?’

‘I’ll have a lemon squash,’ I said.

‘A lemon squash?’

‘Yeah,’ Shadow piped up. ‘Ceese don’t drink.’

So I bought Guitar a Jim Beam and he bought me a lemon squash, and from then on we formed a pretty tight friendship. He started coming to the tavern most nights and we’d go for rides of a weekend. You could see me and Guitar up the Cross together at least twice a week, a Gladiator and a Hells Angel sitting side by side on our bikes, yakking on. He knew just about every sheila in the Cross. They’d be coming past: ‘How ya goin’, Guitar? How ya goin’ Caesar?’

Other blokes would be up there sitting on their Harleys too. Mostly independents who weren’t in a club, like Rat and Shotgun Frank. They’d park alongside each other of a Friday and Saturday night and just sit there. Sooner or later a sheila would walk up and ask to go for a ride with one of them. The bloke would take her round the block, then off to a nearby flat they had for a screw. Afterwards he’d drop her back and continue sitting. That was their life. They didn’t have to go hunting the women, the women would come up to them.

We were up there one night when Guitar decided to go for a ride up the main drag. He’d been gone fifteen minutes and I was starting to think something might have happened to him. I was just about to kick over the bike and go looking for him but next minute here he was, tearing down the main street of the Cross, and he’d picked up the Dargie Sisters, a singing duo who’d just come off stage at the Manzil Room. They had on the tight leopard-skin catsuits, big boots, big hair, one of them sitting on Guitar’s tank and the other one behind him. Guitar was yahooing all the way along the main drag. Did a big U-ey down at Bayswater Road, then back again, four times before finally pulling in to where I was. ‘I’m having a good time tonight,’ he crowed.

The Hells Angels were the average size of a club at that time, about fifteen strong. They got much bigger later on, but most of the clubs in the seventies were only around twelve to twenty members. It wasn’t until the late eighties and early nineties that club chapters started to sprout up everywhere. I reckon twelve to fifteen blokes is a good size for a chapter. You get to be really tight. Me and Guitar used to talk about it a fair bit. He told me about a brawl in the United States between his American brothers and a club called the Breed. More than ninety members of the Breed took on the Angels at a Cleveland motorcycle show. There were only twenty-four Angels, but the Angels kicked the shit out of them. Four dead to one. Which went to show it wasn’t all about numbers. It went on the quality of the club.

I
WAS
out with the Gladiators one night when we picked up a sheila and took her back to Lurch’s flat. All the blokes except me went through her. Then Lurch went and fell in love with her.

I said to him, ‘She’s only a slut. You’re mad.’

Two days later we went round to Lurch’s and he was gone. He’d packed up with this sheila and taken off. And worse, he’d taken his colours with him. So me and Bull tracked him down to a flat in Enmore. Knocked on the door.

‘Yeah?’ It was Lurch. Bull kicked in the door. Lurch was standing there and Bull’s gone,
bang
, sent him flying across the bed. As he was getting up it was my turn.
Bang
, and he went down again. Lurch could really fight, too, but he was lying on the floor cowering behind his hands: ‘I don’t want no more.’

I turned round to Bull at the next meeting and said, ‘See what happened with Lurch? He’s a really good bluer, he was someone that youse accepted as a member in the club, but when he got a bit of a thumping, he chucked it in.’

With our numbers dwindling I could see the club just wasn’t going anywhere. Hanging around the Com-ancheros and the Angels I saw clubs that were growing and moving forward. As tight as we were, and as fearsome a reputation as my brothers had, the Gladiators just didn’t have a strong image as a thriving club. I sat back night after night and thought, How can I change the club? To change the club meant I had to change my brothers’ minds, but they were dead set in their idea that all members had to be able to fight.

To a point I agreed with them. I liked a small, tight club. I knew it was about quality and not quantity. But I also realised that for a club to keep going, you had to bring in new blood, and younger blood. You had to have all different sorts of people in your club.

At the next meeting I had one last shot at convincing them. But it was no good. They came up with the same old arguments. They weren’t willing to change. In fact, they wanted to take it a step further and introduce an initiation test: if a bloke wanted to join the club he had to hang round for a bit, and then he had to pick one of the brothers to fight. If he beat the brother, or even held his own, he could become a nominee.

I could see this was just never going to work. I thought, Blokes aren’t gunna want to come to a club where the first thing they’re asked to do is get into a blue with a member, especially when it’s blokes like my brothers.

At the end of the meeting I turned around and said, ‘Well, I’m handing in me colours. Youse can run the club the way youse want.’

A
COUPLE
of weeks later John Boy approached me. He’d heard that I’d quit the Gladiators and said Jock had sent him to come and see if I’d become a nom for the Comancheros.

‘Will you do it for me? Remember, you gave me your word,’ he said.

Since going to the pub and their club party I’d got to know a few of the Comos and some of them weren’t bad blokes. Snoddy and John Boy and a few of the others seemed really staunch. But, more importantly, I’d given my word. I don’t give it very often, but when I do I keep it.

So I said, ‘Yeah, all right, I’ll join youse.’

Not long afterwards I ran into Guitar and he said, ‘I heard you left the Gladiators.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Any chance you coming over to the Angels?’

‘I would’ve loved to but you’re a few weeks too late.’

‘Whaddya mean?’

‘I’m a nom for the Comancheros.’

‘Ah, fuck! I was outta town, I only just heard that you’d left the Gladiators.’

‘Well if you’d come and asked me before John Boy I’d have went with ya.’

But it was too late. I owed John Boy and I’d given him my word. I packed away my Gladiators vest and got a new one with the word
Nominee
written on it. And I became a Como.

J
ock Ross had started the Comancheros in 1966, naming the club after a John Wayne film of the same name. In the film, the Comancheros were a gang of white renegade whiskey- and gun-runners with a secret Mexican hideout. By the time I joined up in August 1978, Jock Ross’s Comancheros were an outlaw motorcycle club of thirteen blokes who owned Parramatta, the heart of Sydney’s west. With no clubhouse, the members based themselves at the Ermington Hotel, on the corner of Victoria and Silver-water roads.

I’d gone from being the president of my own club to a lowly nominee. Being a nominee meant you were there to watch, and to do what you were told. You weren’t included in meetings, your opinion wasn’t taken into account, and you were always on call so that if there was a shitty job that needed doing, you were available to do it. I watched the other noms being sent on bike watch, building fences, mowing lawns for members – but the funny thing was that I wasn’t asked to do any of that. I was being treated more like a member. Maybe they were just respecting my previous role with the Gladiators, but I had a sense that there was more to it than that.

M
E AND
Donna moved into a house on the corner of Frederick Street and Liverpool Road, Ashfield, coincidentally the same house where I’d gone to my first Comanchero party. And late in 1978 I decided it was time to marry her. I was still technically married to Irene, but that didn’t stop us from having a club wedding.

We got a bloke from a Christian club in North Parramatta who was a registered cleric, and I told him the story.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know it’s not going to be a hundred per cent legal.’

‘I realise that, but I want the ceremony. I want to make her my wife.’

‘All right, I’ll do it for you.’

So we had a wedding ceremony at a Comanche-ros’ house, wearing our bike gear, and Donna legally changed her name to Campbell. As far as the club was concerned, that made her my wife. And Donna was the perfect club wife. She understood that the club was for the men and that the old ladies were only guests. She knew that you kept your mouth shut and you didn’t ask questions. And she knew the meaning of loyalty. She made friends and earned a lot of respect in the club. At Christmas, if there were any blokes at a loose end, she’d invite them round for dinner with us. It was a tight club where everyone looked out for each other, and she fitted right in.