Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs (35 page)

There had been times when Outlaws had gone out with the specific intention of murdering members of the Angels, in revenge for the shooting of Switch for example, but any hunting expeditions had always followed strict protocols to ensure nothing could be pinned on any individual member of the club. What the south Warwickshire chapter had done was so ill conceived it amounted to a massive tactical error, and a PR disaster.

It seemed that Turner and his gang could not have chosen a worse random victim. They had not only killed a Hell’s Angel. According to those who knew him outside the biker fraternity, Tobin was the closest thing to a real angel you could hope to find. Born in England, brought up in northern Alberta, Canada, in his youth Tobin had been a born-again Christian, who ‘used to have Bible talks at work in the mornings and prayer meetings in the afternoon,’ according to former colleague Tim Pogue.

He had lived in south east London, and worked as a mechanic in a Harley-Davidson dealership, since 1999. His comrades knew him as ‘Gentleman Gerry’. Police described him as ‘hard-working, friendly, but private’. He had no criminal record in England or Canada. And when his girlfriend Rebecca Smith appeared to the press, tearfully standing beside Marcus Berriman, president of the London
chapter of the Hell’s Angels, she won the sympathy of a nation.

A statement read out on her behalf said: ‘Gerry was a thinking man, always ready and able to offer guidance and support to others, a true inspiration to many people, a charming personality whose quick-witted humour always kept everyone smiling. He was a rare breed of man with the heart of a lion and a soul filled with compassion and selflessness. Gerry was both a man of his word and a defender of his principles.

‘The nature of his untimely death due to a callous and cowardly act of violence from which it was impossible to defend himself, only accentuates further the pain and suffering that we are all experiencing due to this terrible loss.’ Over 3,000 Hell’s Angels from around the world attended his funeral.

Yet despite the palpable fear and dissent in the Outlaws camp, there was no question about what the official line would be once the perpetrators were fully identified: the club would back them every inch of the way, no matter what.
‘Your brother isn’t always right, but he is always your brother.’

Det Supt Ken Lawrence had fully expected a long and difficult investigation, the type that stretched on for months and months with little progress and repeatedly ran into brick wall after brick wall. He could not have been more wrong.

While the actual execution of Gerry Tobin had been carried out with a fair degree of slick professionalism, the cover up was utterly shoddy and amateurish to the nth
degree. The investigating team knew the vehicle they were looking out for was a Rover 600 series, so when a burnt out model was found in a Coventry side street the day after the killing, alarm bells sounded. Although the fire had rendered the interior forensically useless, the serial number on the engine block allowed detectives to trace the registered owner. The details were false but when detectives looked to see who had owned the car before that, it turned out to be none other than Sean Creighton.

After that, the clues came thick and fast. Creighton and Dane Garside were seen on CCTV at a nearby petrol station wrapped in hats and warm clothes despite it being a a hot summer’s day. They were blatantly carrying out surveillance and had weapons concealed about their persons. Five days after the murder, a surveillance team followed Creighton as he met up with the rest of the south Warwickshire chapter of the Outlaws at the Tollgate Pub in Coundon where they sat outside and bought no drinks but took extensive notes during an intensive debriefing session.

A raid on the clubhouse in Coventry turned up two shotguns in a bag with Simon Turner’s fingerprints on them. More guns were found at Creighton’s home address. Police also found the dummy used for shooting practice. Within ten days of Tobin’s death, the entire chapter had been rounded up and charged with murder.

January 2008

Five months after Tobin’s murder, as the seven defendants waited on remand, it was business as usual for the ever-expanding AOA. A handful of Outlaws travelled from Birmingham to Alicante in order to help celebrate the launch of the newly formed Costa Blanca chapter. After a week of hard partying, they arrived back at the airport only to find a similar number of Hell’s Angels getting ready to board the same flight home.

None of the men were armed but, with each side hoping to gain the upper hand, a series of frantic phone calls was made to the UK, calling for reinforcements to meet the flight with as many weapons as they could get their hands on. Both gangs knew the score by now – nobody had forgotten the airport attacks in Denmark in which associates from both sides had been killed.

Some Outlaws – particularly those with good friends on the incoming flight – raced to the scene in order to defend their brothers. Others took perhaps a little more time than was necessary. Boone found himself dragging his heels. It was clear to him that the whole thing was going to be a disaster. Decisions were being made on the spot with no time to think about the consequences. The lack of preparation and lack of planning made it all wrong.

By the time flight ZB499 landed in Birmingham, more than thirty men from across the West Midlands had gathered at the airport. The fight took place in a link-way joining the two airport terminals, close to where the passengers emerge after clearing customs. With virtually no warning, those fresh off the plane met up with fellow gang members, grabbed their weapons and charged. Knives and meat cleavers as well as iron bars, knuckle dusters, hammers and even a tyre iron were all put to savage use as terrified families ran for cover. Witnesses even reported one man wielding a samurai sword.

The airport is patrolled by armed police, but the officers on duty felt that it was not safe to intervene and kept their distance. Remarkably only one of the bikers was critically injured in the clash. Boone felt grateful that at least the Coventry boys were being held on remand for the Tobin murder. Had they been at liberty, no doubt they would have been first on the scene and the carnage would have been far worse.

Twelve bikers were eventually brought to court. The average age of the seven Outlaws in the dock was forty-seven, the eldest being fifty-one and the youngest forty-four. (At forty-one-years-old, Boone still found himself one of the younger members of the club.) By contrast, the Angels had spent the months before the battle recruiting heavily – the average age of their defendants was forty, with the youngest aged just twenty-eight.

The new Angels were not necessarily bikers at heart, but they had enough of an interest to allow them to be fast-tracked into the club. Many were thought to be actively involved in drugs and gun dealing, all part of an effort by
the Angels to establish themselves further in the UK market and to boost their fighting strength in the aftermath of the murder of Gerry Tobin. Boone’s appetite for violence and destruction wasn’t what it used to be, and yet it was obvious that the war was going to continue and that there would be more clashes in the future – clashes in which the Outlaws were likely to find themselves up against men who were considerably younger and fitter.

Inevitably, recriminations bounced around the club. Those Outlaws who had failed to make it to Birmingham on time were questioned about just how hard they had tried. So far as Boone was concerned, the only real winners from the situation had been the police and it was daft for the gang to keep losing members to prison. But Outlaw rules state that a call to action must be answered; fines were issued and a couple of members were busted back to prospect for failing to respond in time.

The Outlaws came under increasingly intense scrutiny. In March 2008, Outlaw David Melles was arrested in Gloucestershire after police found an armoury of illegal guns at his home. The fifty-two-year-old grandfather had stashed a sawn-off and pump action shotgun, a Derringer pistol, dum dum bullets and other ammunition at his house near Stroud. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

In May 2008, Derbyshire Constabulary received intelligence that the Hell’s Angels were planning a retaliatory attack against the Outlaws at the Rock and Blues show that year. The twenty-fifth anniversary show was set to have a great line-up, but the police’s objections were sufficient to force the organisers to retract their application for a premises licence.

The club were stunned – the Rock and Blues was a major money earner for the Outlaws. Without it, they would have to find other ways of swelling the coffers – and so far as the senior officers were concerned, this meant stepping up their involvement in the drug trade. Boone decided to take a back seat in the numerous operations that were going on around. Enough was enough; he had no desire to go back to prison.

The trial of the seven men accused of the murder of Gerry Tobin was scheduled to begin on 3rd October 2008. The day before the jury was sworn in, Sean Creighton changed his plea.

The sergeant-at-arms of the south Warwickshire chapter of the Outlaws claimed that he alone had murdered Gerry Tobin. It soon became clear that this was a tactical move aimed at giving the rest of the chapter the chance of getting off scot-free. Creighton also claimed that, rather than being sergeant-at-arms, he was in fact president of the chapter and the only one with the authority to arrange and order such a murder.

Turner took full advantage of his comrade’s confession and told the court that he had been working at an industrial unit on the day of the killing but had handed over his phone to Creighton, neatly explaining why the police had traced his mobile signal along the same route the killers took. Turner added that he had been suspended from the chapter after arguing with other members at a motorcycle repair unit in Coventry, just a few hours before Tobin was shot.

He was unable to explain how plastic bags containing two shotguns were found at his workplace, with his fingerprints on them. When prosecutor Timothy Raggatt QC asked if the
fingerprints were an unhappy coincidence, he replied: ‘My whole life seems to be an unhappy coincidence.’

Turner also told the court that co-defendant Malcolm Bull had insulted his fellow Outlaws by making statements to the police because the Outlaws Rule 14 imposed a strict ‘no comment’ policy on its members. ‘Everything about Mr Bull is disreputable to me,’ Turner told the court. ‘[He] has turned on everything that we are – he has brought us to this junction in our life.’

With Creighton prepared to take the rap, the rest of the Outlaws claimed ignorance of the shooting, saying that they thought they were just carrying out a surveillance operation aimed at the Thames Valley Coalition, a loose grouping of bikers that includes the Wessex and Windsor branches of the Hell’s Angels as well as the Windsor 81 support club and the Patriots MC, a gang from south Wales with whom the Outlaws have been at odds for some years. It was a plausible explanation.

Both Turner and Dane Garside claimed to have been unimpressed by the surveillance idea but, as loyal chapter members, they had to follow orders. Discipline was strict, according to Garside. He had already been ‘busted back to probate’ for not answering a telephone call, and he had been a member of the club for less than a year.

Giving evidence, Garside refused to identify those involved on the day apart from Creighton. ‘I was in bits,’ he told the court of his reaction to the shooting. ‘I didn’t expect anything like that to happen. I thought: he’s [Creighton’s] going to start shouting verbal. Then all I heard was Bang! Bang! I screamed, “What the hell is going on?” I was told not to look round. As I looked round, I
could still see the gentleman [Tobin] riding the bike. Sean Creighton said, “You just fucking drive this car”.’

The jury found all seven men guilty. Simon Turner, forty-one, from Nuneaton, Warwickshire, was given a minimum term of thirty years for murder and two firearms offences. Coventry man Dane Garside, forty-two, received a minimum twenty-seven years for the same charges. Sean Creighton, forty-four, from Coventry, will spend a minimum of twenty-eight years and six months in prison after pleading guilty to murder and two firearms charges. Malcolm Bull, fifty-three, from Milton Keynes, was sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years in prison for murder and possessing a shotgun. Dean Taylor, forty-seven, from Coventry, will spend at least thirty years in prison for the same charges. Karl Garside, forty-five, from Coventry, was given at least twenty-six years and Ian Cameron, forty-six, also from Coventry, received at least twenty-five years for murder.

Sentencing, Mr Justice Treacy told the defendants: ‘This was an appalling murder. A totally innocent man was executed with a firearm in broad daylight on a busy motorway for no reason other than that he belonged to a different motorcycle club than yours.

‘He was a total stranger to you. The utter pointlessness of what you did makes his murder more shocking. None of you has showed the remotest feeling, consideration or remorse for what you did. This dreadful crime, in my judgment, falls into a particularly high category of seriousness because it involved the use of a firearm and because of its cold-blooded and ruthless nature.’

There was a big show of Outlaw strength throughout the
trial with up to one hundred members in and out of the courthouse. Armed police, weapons at the ready, kept watch.

In December 2008, less than a month after their convictions, Karl Garside and Ian Cameron were voted in as fully patched members of the Outlaws. They had kept their mouths shut during the court proceedings and this was their ultimate reward. Although both would be spending the next twenty-five years in prison, they knew that their families would be looked after and that they could always count on the club for support. Malcolm Bull and Dane Garside would have to survive prison on their own.