I was offered the job of president of the Bandidos, but Snoddy told me he wanted the position. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s keep it the way it’s been. You as president, Shadow as vice-president and I’ll stay sergeant.’
The rest of the colours arrived back from the embroidery place and on the night of 2 December 1983 were handed out to the original members of the Bandidos Australia. First Snoddy and Shadow, then Roach, Bull, Tiny, Lout, Snake, Bongo Snake, Big Tony, Lard, Bushy, Bear, Wack, Chop, Porky, Davo, Kid Rotten, Gloves, Dukes, Knuckles, Charlie, Sparksy, Junior, Bernie, Lance, Zorba, Louie and Opey. There were twenty-nine of us, plus the five original prospects, Rua, Hooky, Sticks, Mouth and Bob. After everybody got their colours, we all went to the bar and toasted the club with an oath I’d made up: ‘Cut one Bandido and we all bleed.’
There were thirteen club rules, but basically they could be summarised by saying you respected your brother and you respected your colours. So you didn’t rip off your brother selling him a crap bike and you didn’t try to crack on to your brother’s old lady.
We swore to each other that the club would be run like a motorcycle club. We weren’t going to have people rocking up in cars and then putting their colours on in the clubhouse like the Comos used to do. And we weren’t going to be like a paramilitary organisation. We were there to ride bikes and have fun.
I used to be on my bike wearing my colours six or seven days a week. If I didn’t have Donna with me, I’d be over seeing someone like Guitar or Matchy from the Angels, or Sy from Lone Wolf, or Metho Tom from the Nomads. It was like being in the Gladiators again. I could talk to blokes from other clubs without recrimination.
To celebrate this new freedom, we threw a big party. I invited Guitar and others from the Angels, and told Sy from Lone Wolf to bring along eight or nine of his blokes that he knew didn’t drink too much or get wasted. I said the same to the Black Ulans. That way I knew there was a lot less chance of someone saying something wrong and starting a blue. The party went great.
I also paid another visit to the local coppers and asked to see the station sergeant. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you know we were Comancheros down at Louisa Road. Well we’re Bandidos now. It’s gunna be the same deal as when I first spoke to ya. You won’t get any trouble in Balmain from us.’ We shook hands again, and as I turned to leave I added, ‘And youse are all still welcome to come down to our club on a Saturday night for a feed.’
At our first official meeting as Bandidos it was agreed that our inaugural run would be the Christmas run, and it would be to Port Macquarie. We’d leave the day after Boxing Day and stay through to the new year.
At the meeting we also decided we were going to kick off the club in a good way by doing something for the street kids in Balmain. There were a lot of them about then. Every member donated money and the old ladies went out and bought T-shirts, tracksuits, jogging shoes and toys. We invited all these young kids, most of them around eleven or twelve, who’d just been left to their own devices by their parents. Davo’s dad – who we called Daddy Cool and was really close to the club – turned up as Santa on Davo’s trike. They got off and all the kids mobbed them as they handed out the presents. The kids were ripping them open, just rapt. Then we took them all down to the front yard – which was really the backyard but we called it the front yard because it was down on the water. We’d set up tables and run an extension cord down for the fridges. The old ladies fed all the kids. There must have been a hundred of them all digging in and having a great old time. Then we cleaned up and all the members went back to have dinner with their own families.
We knew this club was on the right track.
THE DAY we left on the run to Port Macquarie was a rotten stinking day, pouring with rain and windy, but no one cared. We were out on the highway flying our new colours. We were all proud and riding high.
It took us a day longer than expected to get there, but it didn’t matter. Once we reached Port Macquarie we set up in the caravan park and decided to make the local RSL club our base; they had bands on most nights through the holidays, and they had a couple of restaurants, including a nice-looking buffet. Me and Kid Rotten went in and I grabbed the head bouncer, who took me to see the president of the club. I told him what we were there for and that if he let us in we’d treat the place like it was our own, there’d be no trouble. If there was, I explained, I’d make sure that the member or prospect responsible was soon on his way back to the caravan park. And I made the same deal with the head bouncer that I had with Dave out at the Vicar of Wakefield – that if they got into any shit we’d back them up. It worked really well. His bouncers got into trouble one night and we stepped in and helped. Saved a few of them from going to hospital. The president of the RSL club later wrote us a letter thanking us for the way we’d behaved.
I also arranged to get a conference room with a big table for our meetings. So on New Year’s Eve all the prospects were told to wait outside while the members gathered in the conference room to vote on whether we should patch up the new guys. Rua was the first prospect called in to be given his colours. As was the custom, he ended up being drowned in a sea of beer (and orange juice from me). Then we voted Hooky in and he came in and suffered the same fate. Then it was time to vote on Mouth.
I didn’t trust Mouth and nor did Lance. There was just something about him. He seemed sneaky to me. But for some reason Snoddy wanted him in. I think it came back to Snoddy having borrowed a fair amount of money off him. A prospect had to get one hundred per cent of the vote to get into the club so Snoddy had come to me earlier and asked me to vote for Mouth. I’d told Snoddy that I was never going to vote for the bloke. I thought it was even a waste of time keeping him in as a prospect.
Lance agreed, so Snoddy changed tack. ‘Look, Caesar, we’ve been together so long, will ya just do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘I know youse aren’t gunna vote for him, but will youse abstain? That way you’re not voting for him but youse aren’t voting against him.’
Lance and I had a yak about it and Snoddy came back and pleaded with us some more. As a gesture of respect and love for Snoddy, we agreed to go along with it.
That’s how Mouth got into the club. It was a decision I would live to regret.
The other downer for the week was when I found Knuckles wandering the caravan park close to tears because he couldn’t find his caravan; his memory had never recovered after the accident. It was tragic to see such a fine athlete in that condition. Someone came up with the idea to write his caravan number on his arm and that seemed to help.
NOT LONG after our return from the run, journalist Richard Sleeman wrote a story in the Sun newspaper with the headline THE PRINCE IN CAESAR’S PALACE . It was about how we’d all helped Knuckles get back on his feet.
In it he wrote:
when Phil McElwaine was hovering between life and death after a motorbike accident that fractured his skull, the sergeant-at-arms of his bike club thought hospital officials should be reminded of their patient’s importance.
‘I walked up to the doctors and told them they weren’t dealing with just anybody,’ Caesar, of the Bandidos bike gang, said yesterday. ‘Phillip was the gold medal-winning boxing champion. I told them to make sure they looked after him.’
When Caesar wants something done, it generally stays done . . .
Caesar suggested I follow up the Phil McElwaine story and to make sure I wrote it well. It’s difficult while your fingers tremble on the typewriter, but I’ll try . . .
THE CLUB was on a high and everything was going great. The only one who didn’t seem to be revelling in the good vibes was Snoddy. Soon after we got back from the Christmas run, he came over to my place looking down. He told me he didn’t want to be president any more.
‘Why?’
‘Because I can’t party.’
As president, he felt that he had to stay sober because he was responsible for everyone. But that just wasn’t him. He loved hitting the pot and drinking like a fish. So he wasn’t having a good time. Snoddy was a really good member and he wasn’t a bad president. He had the respect of the blokes and he ran the meetings well. It was just that he didn’t like getting offside with blokes he considered to be brothers; he didn’t like telling them off if they needed telling off.
‘Ceese, I want you to be president,’ he said.
But I told him I didn’t want the job. ‘No, go back and give it another couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘If you’re still unhappy we’ll talk some more.’ We agreed on that and a couple of weeks later things obviously hadn’t got any better. He went and saw Shadow and said the same thing to him.
So at an officers’ meeting one night at my place, we sat down and I said to Snoddy, ‘Look, you go on being president. But if somebody needs pulling into line, I’ll do it.’ He usually gave that job to me anyway. ‘You can still go out, party on, do whatever you want, be president, run the meetings, but me and Shadow will look after the club.’
‘I can’t expect youse two to be there twenty-four hours a day,’ he said.
But Shadow and I had already worked out a plan where I’d rock up on club nights at five-thirty and stay till about one in the morning. Shadow would rock up to the club about ten pm and stay till nine or ten am on the Sunday. Shadow didn’t drink either. He liked the bong but when he was doing his job as vice-president he was sober as a judge. With our plan, there was always going to be a clear-headed officer there to look after the members. To me, that was the job of an officer. And I would’ve taken a bullet for any member. That’s how much I thought of them.
So that’s how it went from then. We all adapted easily into our new roles. I got to know Snoddy pretty well during this time, but I still never asked him about his background. There were stories about his mother’s death and things that happened to him as a kid. People used to hear these stories and ask him about it. He hated that. Suddenly they weren’t friends any more. I could see it upset him so I never asked.
I was the same as him in that regard. I didn’t like people pushing me for things. Some people had found out about the underground fighting and all I’d get was: ‘Who did you fight? How much did you make?’ I just kept my mouth shut.
The new order was great for Snoddy. It was like the old Snoddy came back. He was much more settled and full of life and that was good for the club. He loved playing his guitar and going to see bands. His favourite was a blues band called Ivory Coast.
He had good ideas for the club too. One of them was that he, Shadow and I should buy the Louisa Road house. It had been put on the market for about $350,000. This was an absolute waterfront with a view of the Harbour Bridge. We figured it would be worth a fortune in a few years (and it was).
It was a top old three-storey house built in the 1890s. The second storey was all glass at the front and we had the tables and chairs in there for the old ladies to sit in. There was a big pool room. We’d smashed out a wall and made a huge disco room with a bar. The bedrooms were upstairs, and downstairs you could go out onto the front lawn on the harbour where there was a grotto – a little cave in the rock face. We’d run some power leads onto the lawn and put the bands in there.
We’d have fridges and tables full of food. We had spits and hangis. There was a great view of the city lights at night. Harbour cruises used to come up and announce to the passengers that they were passing the notorious Bandidos clubhouse.
And there were always girls. Rua and Big Tony found that if they went over to Circular Quay around lunchtime they could pick up heaps of sheilas. It was only a couple of minutes on the ferry back to the Long Nose Point wharf right below our clubhouse. I’d rock up through the week and see these sheilas sunbaking on the lawn with Tony and Rua running round like kids in a lolly shop. Then the other blokes found out about the supply of girls and rocked up too. Everyone had a key to the clubhouse, so anyone could go in and take a sheila there. But they’d also go just to hang out. You could always get a feed. You could take a meal out of the freezer and cook it up on the big stove which had these great iron skillets. You’d put your money in a tin on top of the fridge, grab a drink from the bar, and go out and sit at one of the tables and watch the boats and the Harbour Bridge.
I’d walk in and grab an orange juice from the big dispensers like you’d see at a pub. And whenever I entered somebody would put ‘Bad to the Bone’ by George Thorogood on the jukebox, or maybe ‘Wild Thing’ by the Troggs. They were my songs and I’d always listen to them if I was pumping myself up for a fight.
As far as alcohol went, we had a deal going with the local bottle-o so we were selling beer for five cents more than what he paid for it. It was the cheapest beer in Sydney for members and their old ladies, although the outsiders who came over on a Friday night had to pay more.
On Saturday nights, club nights, all the old ladies were there, but on Friday night – boys’ night – all the strays would rock up. There’d be women everywhere. One night there was a sheila up there who wanted to take on a fair number of the blokes while she had her monthlies. She took them up to the room that Big Tony rented from the club. When Tony got back to his room there was blood on the walls and all over his sheets.
I wasn’t into any of that. Donna was all the woman I needed. In February 1984, she gave birth to our second child, Lacey. Daniel was three and a half by then and I’d spend most of my time at home with Donna and the kids. I wasn’t the type to change nappies or wash them – that’s women’s work – but sometimes I’d feed them a bottle. I saw my role more as teaching them the other stuff about life, like what my dad taught me. How to handle yourself.
My routine involved going to the club every day to make sure everything was all right. I’d usually rock up to find Rua and Chop mulling up at the bar with the bong sitting there. I preferred them bonging on rather than hitting the spirits. I used to hate it if they’d been drinking spirits before we went to a pub because I knew there were going to be blues. Spirits made all the blokes nasty. Some more than others. And I had about eight in the club who got real nasty on spirits – my brother Snake being one of them. Lard and Sparksy too.
One night we were over at the Bayview Tavern in Gladesville watching a band, and Sparksy wanted a particular song played. The bloke said, ‘I’ve already played it. I’ll play it again in an hour or two.’ Next thing I knew, Sparksy was up on stage and had the microphone cord wrapped around the lead singer’s neck, strangling the bloke.
Not again.
So I got up on stage, dragged Sparksy off. ‘That’s it, you’re back to the clubhouse.’
I grabbed two prospects and told them: ‘Now you take him back to the clubhouse and you stay there with him.’
‘But he’s a member. We can’t tell him what to do.’
‘I’m your sergeant. You do what I tell ya.’
So they escorted him back to the clubhouse. When I eventually got back there, Sparksy came up all apologetic about carrying on at the pub. I said, ‘Sparksy, mate, you’re just gunna have to calm down. Drink beer or something.’
So whenever I saw those guys on the bong before we went out, I thought, Beauty. Haven’t gotta watch them tonight.
But there was always something to watch out for. One night around this time we got into a fight with a huge group of Islanders at the Croydon Hotel. We kicked the shit out of them but afterwards I couldn’t find Chop and Wack. I went outside and there they were, holding this Islander by the ankles over a brick wall. Below them, down in the cutting on the other side of the wall, was the railway station.
‘What are youse doin’?’ I wanted to know.
‘Waitin’ for a train,’ they said.
‘Will ya pull ’im up?’ I said, like I was rousing on two naughty kids.
They pulled him up and thumped him.
I got all the blokes together and had a word with the manager. I said, ‘Work out what your damages are and we’ll pay half.’ I got the blokes outside and as usual mine was the last bike to start. I was just about to give the signal to leave when half a house brick hurtled past Donna’s head.
That’s something you don’t do: go near my woman. So I was off the bike and back into the pub punching on again. Everyone was off their bikes right behind me. All the blokes that were lying on the floor were getting stomped. Then we heard sirens so we all went back to the bikes.
Coincidentally, Big Tony was sitting in a holding cell at the Campsie police station at this point. He’d been off elsewhere and got picked up on a warrant. He heard the police radio going off. ‘All police to the Croydon Hotel! All police to the Croydon Hotel! Bandidos rioting!’
He said he was in there cracking up at all the coppers running around looking for batons and shields. He said to one bloke as he was running out the door, ‘You’re gunna get ya head kicked in tonight.’
We’d all got back to our bikes and were riding down Croydon Road when suddenly there was just cop car after cop car streaming down. There were thirty-four of us there, I think, and I was out in front. Snoddy pulled up alongside me: ‘Whadda we doin’?’
‘We’re goin’ back to the clubhouse,’ I said over the rumble. ‘If it’s gunna be a punch-on, it’s gunna be back where we can put the ol’ ladies and that.’ So we gunned it. Thirty-four bikes that weren’t going to stop for anything. Through red lights. Cars were parting. The sheilas were terrified. It was the most mighty roar of engines. We thundered back the ten kilometres to the clubhouse, put all the bikes away, sent the old ladies inside and lined ourselves up in the cul-de-sac, me standing out the front, waiting for the coppers.
They pulled up and a big D got out of the car second from the front. He looked a real smartarse and I thought, Ah, there’s gunna be trouble tonight. But then a crown sergeant got out who I recognised from Five Dock.
I turned to the blokes. ‘Just cool it and let me talk to this bloke.’
I walked up and told him how we were at the Croydon, that there were three young blokes there about eighteen years old, and they had a girl with them who was about seventeen. All these Islanders had tried raping the young sheila and we’d stepped in to save her. That’s when the brawl broke out, I said.
The sergeant looked at me. ‘And that’s what happened, is it?’
‘Oh shit yeah. She’d have been raped, prob’ly killed, if it wasn’t for us.’
‘So, all this trouble was because you were defending a young girl?’
‘That’s right. The boyfriend prob’ly would’ve been stomped to death too. Actually, you should be giving us an award.’
The detective butted in. ‘I reckon that’s a lot of bullshit.’
No shit, Sherlock.
Next minute, there was another siren and lights, and this paddy wagon was coming down the footpath towards us. The local sergeant and one of his blokes got out. ‘I’ve heard over the radio what’s going on. I’m just here to say that these blokes have never caused any problems in the Balmain area. I’d like to speak up for them.’
‘You’d actually stand up for these guys?’ the detective asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘All right.’
The big sergeant from Five Dock turned to me. ‘Can I have a word with you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Caesar, that was the biggest pack of bullshit I’ve ever heard in me life.’
‘Well, now, did you want to get into a fight tonight?’
‘No.’
‘Well neither did I.’
I’d given them an out and they’d taken it.
Getting all the cop cars out of Louisa Road was another story. It was such a narrow street, lined with all the BMWs and Mercedes of the doctors and lawyers and famous writers who lived there, they practically had a demolition derby trying to leave.
ONE OF the proudest times I had with the Bandidos was once when I was on my own down at a pub in Balmain and there were about forty wharfies there, all making fun of the big bad biker thing. I was standing there solo, surrounded by all these wharfies, thinking, Fuck, I’m gunna be in hospital for six months. Luckily the barmaid knew me. Most of the pubs in Balmain had our clubhouse phone number. She rang the clubhouse and next thing I knew I looked over my shoulder and there was Kid Rotten, Opey, Charlie, Davo, plus Snake and my other brothers. All standing there. It’s hard to explain, but I got this real warm feeling. Here was this bunch of blokes who’d rush down even though they knew they were going to be outnumbered. They were standing behind me, all ready to go, and telling these blokes, ‘You want to take on one Bandido, you take on all Bandidos.’
They were living out the motto I’d made up for the club: cut one Bandido and we all bleed. It made me so proud to be part of this club.
THERE WERE four blokes hanging around the club – Tramp, Sleazy, Maverick and Scotty – and in about April or May 1984 we decided to make them prospects. Maverick was the brother of the chick Snoddy was going out with.
A couple of weeks after they’d been made prospects, Donna and I pulled up at the clubhouse on the Saturday night and Shadow had a real stern look on his face. I could tell he was agitated. He pulled me aside and said the new prospect Scotty had been fucking around with another club, causing trouble.
‘What club?’ I asked.
‘The Lone Wolf.’
‘Have you spoken to anyone?’
‘Yeah, I’ve spoken to a couple of their top blokes.’
‘What’s their version?’
‘Completely different to Scotty’s.’
‘Well get in touch with the blokes you were talking to and take Scotty out there. Just watch how Scotty reacts when he has to front them.’
So Shadow did that and reported back that Scotty had made a complete dick of himself and fucked up something bad. Shadow made an agreement with the Wolves that we’d take care of Scotty ourselves.
A lot of the blokes wanted to stomp the shit out of Scotty. But me and Shadow figured if that happened, he’d probably end up dead, so we came up with another idea. Seeing as he was a fuck-up, we thought we’d brand him with the letter F.
We brought in all the prospects so they could see what happened when you fucked up. I heated up an iron bar till it was red hot. Then I pushed it hard into Scotty’s wrist to make the long straight part of the F. I smelt burning hair and flesh, and I pressed harder still. All of a sudden there was nothing pushing back against the iron. I looked to see what had happened and I was more than a little surprised to see that the metal was that hot it had just burnt through and out the other side of his wrist. I could smell the blood burning and hear it sizzling on the iron.
Scotty had not made a sound. But he looked very pale, like he was going to pass out. He had to sit down. Charlie stuck his head out the window ready to chuck. The rest of the prospects looked like they wanted to run.
Shadow told Scotty to get back up, that it wasn’t finished. I’d pulled the bar out of his wrist and Shadow picked up a hot knife now and made the other two lines, completing an F that didn’t look too messy, considering. Snoddy reckoned it was the most sickening thing he’d ever seen.
We sent Scotty to the hospital with the other prospects and never saw him again. Scotty had lied to the club and he nearly caused a lot of shit between us and a club that we were pretty friendly with. We didn’t want to go to war with anybody. We’d left all that bullshit behind us with Jock.
UNFORTUNATELY, JOCK hadn’t left us behind. He’d got it into his head that his honour had been impugned when we walked out on the Comancheros, and he was getting ready to avenge it. While we’d been having a good time partying and going on runs like a bike club should, the Comos had been busy recruiting.
I got a call from Leroy, who Snoddy and I had tried so hard to get out of jail. He was out at last, he said. And Jock had paid the bail.
We arranged to meet at the Royal Oak in North Parramatta and a big group of us went along to see him. As soon as we walked in, Leroy told us, ‘You know if I had me choice, I’d be with youse.’
‘Well why aren’t ya?’ I asked.
Leroy said that Jock had offered to bail him out, but only on the condition that Leroy give him his word that he’d stay loyal to him and do whatever Jock asked. Leroy didn’t know at that stage what had gone down with the club; visiting him in jail no one had wanted to bring him down with talk of the split. So Leroy had given Jock his word.
Sitting there at the pub, we told him we understood his predicament.
‘You all know what I think of you and that I love youse,’ he said. ‘You and Snoddy and Shadow were the ones that got me into the club in the first place. If I’d have known what was happening, I’d have told Jock to stick his bail up his arse. I’d have stuck it out in jail.’
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Snoddy. ‘We were trying to get the money together to bail you out.’
‘Well, it’s done now and I’ve given me word.’
He more or less said he was sorry that he was going up against us. ‘I’m not dumb,’ he said. ‘I know what Jock’s got me out for.’
It was obvious to us too. Leroy was a big, impressive-looking bloke and he was about the only one Jock had who might stand a chance against my brothers or myself. It was a classic Jock manoeuvre.
We put talk of Jock behind us and had a drink. Leroy asked me how Donna was.
‘Still the best-looking chick in the club,’ I said.
‘You’re not wrong,’ Leroy said.
‘You been hitting the iron while you been in the Bay?’ Chop asked. ‘You’re nearly as big as Ceese.’
‘How big are you round the chest?’ Leroy asked me.
‘Fifty-three inches, unexpanded.’
‘What about your arms?’
‘Right arm nineteen and a half inches, left arm nineteen inches.’
‘You’re still a bit bigger than me,’ he said.
‘And they’ll have to stretch you another four inches so we can be eye to eye,’ I said.
We all had a good laugh. Shadow walked back from the bar. ‘Sounds like you blokes are having a good time.’
‘You still got the fastest bike in the club, Shadow?’ Leroy asked.
‘Caesar and Lout think they have, but Lout spends more time pushing that Pan than riding it.’
It was a good night. We chewed the fat and had a laugh. At the end, we all shook hands and Leroy said, ‘I wish you guys all the best with your new club.’ But there was something in his voice. He said it like he was apologising for something that hadn’t happened yet.