In June 1984, our member Junior went to a swap meet at the Rebels’ clubhouse with his old lady, Cathy. As it turned out, Jock’s two sidekicks, Foghorn and Snowy, were there with a Como prospect called Pee Wee who, as you’d expect with a name like that, was a pretty big unit.
They started following Junior around and insulting Cathy. Junior was only twenty-two and as strong as an ox, but everyone knew he couldn’t fight to save himself. But everyone also knew that Junior had a bit of ticker and would never run away from a fight no matter how many blokes were lined up against him. The Comos knew that made Junior an easy mark. They kept pushing him and pushing him till he stood his ground and offered them on. It was just about to blow up when a Rebel came down and told them to take their problems elsewhere. So Junior left and, being the man he is, waited for Snowy, Foghorn and this Pee Wee prick down the road.
The Comos stopped and Junior asked them why they were insulting his old lady, he hadn’t done anything to them. With that, Foghorn took a piece of a Harley fork leg he’d just bought and smacked Junior in the face with it, breaking Junior’s jaw. Then Snowy and Pee Wee held him down while Foghorn stabbed him in the face, before they all started putting the boot in.
Junior was a mess. Cathy helped him back to the bike and they got up to Canterbury Hospital. I got a call from Cathy to say that he was going in for surgery and I raced up there as fast as I could.
The quacks said it would be a couple of days before Junior was able to talk, so I just went up there every day and sat by him until he came out of it. When he eventually could talk, his jaw was wired so he was hard to understand, but he told me enough. And it didn’t surprise me. It was always Foghorn’s go to be a tough man when the odds were in his favour.
‘Whaddya wanna do about this?’ I asked. ‘Do you want the club to take care of it? Or do you want me to do it?’
‘What would you do if this had happened to you?’ he asked.
‘Well, if it was to do with the club and the club had been insulted, I’d let the club know. But if me old lady had been insulted, I’d take care of it meself. Whether I got ’em one at a time or two on one or whether I’d use the baseball bat or an iron bar, I dunno, but I’d get the blokes meself.’
‘You wouldn’t involve the club?’
‘No, I might get one of me brothers to help me if I thought I couldn’t handle it, but I think I’d take care of it meself.’
‘Well that’s what I want to do then. It’s personal. I’ll fix it up myself.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘The rest of the club are firing up so I’d better get over to the clubhouse.’
When I got back to Louisa Road, every member was there, ready to rip heads off. I briefed Snoddy on what Junior told me. Then he pulled all the blokes together in the pool room and told them that Junior was going to handle it himself; that it was a personal issue, not a club issue. A lot of the blokes still wanted to go out and bash Comos.
‘I know how youse feel,’ I said. ‘I feel like going out and punching those cunts’ heads in meself, but we’ve got to respect the man’s wishes or he’s going to think that we don’t respect him.’
Everyone agreed with this. A lot of the fellas headed over to the hospital to visit Junior. It wasn’t a good night at the clubhouse.
The next day, the Comancheros’ Strike Force sergeant-at-arms, Sheepskin, called me and, given what had happened to Junior, it wasn’t a real friendly call at the start. Even though I personally liked Sheepskin I wasn’t in the mood for exchanging pleasantries. But Sheepskin soon explained that he was ringing to see how Junior was and to ask me for Junior’s side of the story. So I told him.
‘I thought it would be something like that,’ Sheepskin said. ‘I heard Snowy and Foghorn’s version and, knowing Junior, I figured that what they said was a bunch of shit.’
‘What did Foghorn and Snowy reckon happened?’ I asked.
Sheepskin said they’d claimed that Junior was running down the Comancheros and making fun of Jock, and he’d put it on them. ‘That’s why I was suspicious,’ he said. ‘I knew Junior wouldn’t start any fight.’
He asked me to give him a couple of days and he’d get back to me. ‘You’ve got me word that I’ll try and find out what’s going on.’ He paused, then asked me, ‘Ya know, is this gunna be an all-out blue and everything?’
‘You’ll find out one way or another.’
He rang back two days later and told me that he’d grabbed the nom, Pee Wee, and taken him out behind the clubhouse. Sheepskin told him, ‘Now don’t fuckin’ lie to me or I’ll smack your head in.’ After about fifteen minutes Pee Wee told him his version, which was nearly identical to Junior’s.
‘Youse are lucky this time,’ I told Sheepskin. ‘Junior wants to front those three cocksuckers himself. It’s not gunna be an all-in. But you can tell Foghorn and Snowy and that other prick of a prospect of yours that the next time I see them they’re gunna feel me boot in their faces. And if it happens again I won’t be holding me brothers back.’
‘I sorta figured that was going to be your response, but there’s not much I can do about it. Foghorn’s in Jock’s ear non-stop. This is heading for trouble.’
‘I don’t know why you won’t just leave the prick. You know I’ve always trusted ya. You’ve always kept yer word. But being in charge of the Strike Force seems to be changing ya, Sheepskin. You’re not the same man ya were when I first came round the club.’
I told him it was up to him to keep it cool on his side and I’d try to do the same with my brothers.
‘Well I can only try me best,’ he said.
‘Well your best better be pretty good.’
NOT LONG after Junior’s bashing, a few of the blokes decided to ride up to the Bull & Bush Hotel, thirty kilometres away in Baulkham Hills, after a club meeting one night. About eight or nine of them rocked up to the pub only to discover about ten Comos – or Condoms as we’d started calling them, because you had to be a dick to be one – already there. In the crowd, Big Tony recognised the prospect Pee Wee, who at about six three was easy to spot across the room. Even though we’d agreed we were going to let Junior square up himself, I suppose Big Tony just couldn’t resist. He went over and picked up Pee Wee and threw him straight through a plate-glass window.
Snoddy was there too and he started laying in along with Bushy and my brother Shadow. Snoddy tried scalping some bloke and got hold of a little peanut they called Nugget. A Como called Dog also copped a beating. Our guys were outnumbered but the Comos just faded away.
Snoddy rang me later that night to tell me what had happened.
‘Whaddya think’ll come of this?’ he asked me.
‘We’ll just have to sit back and see.’
IT DIDN’T take long to find out. Chop, Louie and Charlie were at the clubhouse one night in July 1984, pulling cones in the second-floor kitchen which faced down onto Louisa Road. Next thing they knew, bullets were flying through the wall, which was only made out of a thin ply. They raced to the window and saw that it was Foghorn and Sparra. The only damage done was to a small room at the back of the house which was made out of fibro. Some shotgun pellets had gone through the walls and a high-powered rifle bullet had hit some brickwork.
The neighbours called the cops, but when they turned up, Chop told them he didn’t know what they were talking about. Outlaw clubs just don’t go to the coppers because you know they’re not going to do anything except try and lock someone up. The coppers like to think of themselves as the biggest club in the country, and when they run into a bunch of blokes who won’t abide by their laws they don’t like it.
About two nights later, there was a second shooting at Louisa Road. There was no more damage, but the neighbours called the cops again.
We’d always known Jock wouldn’t fight us head on; too many of us could fight. Our front line was like bulldozers and the others were a pretty handy back-up. You didn’t find blokes like that at bike shops.
It was clear Jock would just continue taking sneaky pot shots at us.
WE USED to go to the Royal Oak at North Parramatta fairly often – even though it was in Como territory – because one of our members, Lout, was the manager there. One night Lout was alone at work when all of a sudden Jock, Leroy and another Como walked into the bar. Jock was carrying on about how there weren’t going to be any Bandidos in Parramatta. He was making a big statement out of it: here they were, three Comos unafraid to stroll into a Bandit pub.
That was the extent of it and Lout duly told us what had gone on. But later that night I got a call from Leroy, who kept in touch even though he was still a Como. He told me that in fact he, Jock and the third Como hadn’t been alone when they walked into the pub. He said Jock had the entire Comanchero club sitting up around the corner in a side street. He had a member standing out on the street watching the pub, and if one of them had stepped out and given the signal, the entire club was going to charge in.
We filled the club in on the details at the next meeting night, and on the following Saturday, club night, we left the old ladies at Louisa Road with a couple of prospects while we rode into Parramatta. We cruised around, revved the bikes, stopped at just about every pub there. Then we cruised up to the Royal Oak, where we spent a couple of hours. We didn’t see a single Comanchero, but we’d done what we’d gone to do. We could make statements too.
ABOUT TWO weeks after the blue at the Bull & Bush, Snoddy called everyone and told us to come to the clubhouse. He had something important to say.
Once all the members had arrived, we gathered in the pool room where we held our meetings and Snoddy made his announcement. Jock had rung him to declare war on the club.
It might have been funny if it wasn’t so serious.
Snoddy said he’d told Jock it was bullshit and that the two of them should just settle it between them, one on one.
Jock wouldn’t be in it.
Snoddy had also offered him the option of the two sergeants fighting.
‘You’d love that, wouldn’t ya,’ Jock had said. ‘A punch-up man on man. You know you’d wipe us out. Nuh, this is going to be guerilla warfare. There’s no rules. You won’t know when we’re going to hit you or where.’
Snoddy said Jock had continued to rattle on – ‘You know I’m the supreme commander . . . We’re not gunna stop till we wipe you out . . .’ – until Snoddy got sick of it and hung up on him.
We spent the rest of the night talking about what Jock would do next. I thought he’d sit back and build up his club, taking in anybody on two wheels, and that he wouldn’t strike until he had about fifty blokes. Others disagreed. I almost got myself killed finding out that they were right.
ABOUT THREE days after war was declared, I decided to go for a ride into Parramatta by myself to see if any Comos tried pulling me up. If they did, I was going to bash them and take their colours. Unfortunately, while I was out looking for them, I think they were out looking for me. I only got as far as Five Dock, about three kilometres from home, when a little white Jap car pulled up alongside me on Parramatta Road. I recognised Foghorn and Sparra with another Como I’d never seen before. I tried to pull ahead but all of a sudden they swerved at me. I tried putting my leg out to stop their car hitting the bike, but the bike went down and suddenly I was underneath it, sliding along at a fair speed towards the gutter, trying to hold the bike up so it didn’t get too badly damaged.
I was in big trouble, but it was my lucky day. I missed the gutter and bounced up the driveway of a car yard instead, the bike on top of me and petrol pouring from the tank. I came to a stop and felt okay but I couldn’t lift the bike off. This dopey car salesman was standing there with all these other dudes in suits: ‘Are you hurt?’ Not one of the stupid pricks tried pulling the bike off. A young bloke riding past on his pushy stopped and tried to lift the bike off me. It was too heavy for him but he took enough of the weight for me to leverage my leg and push it off. I got it up onto its stand, grabbed the car yard hose and washed the bike off before washing myself down. I straightened the handlebars, checked the bike, then got back on and rode home.
I was straight on the blower to Snoddy and told him it was on. With that, Snoddy called a meeting. Everyone turned up and I told them what had happened, warning them to be careful.
Someone asked, ‘D’ya think he’s gunna keep going like this? Will running you off the road even up for the Bull & Bush?’
‘The Bull & Bush was us evening up for Junior,’ Snoddy said. ‘I think Jock’ll carry on with it. But just like when we were riding with him, he won’t do nothing himself. He’ll send the others out to do the dirty work and he’ll sit back in the clubhouse.’
Over the next few weeks the war intensified, and there was a lot of bashing. It was mainly us doing the bashings, though; Jock’s lot tended to stick to trying to run us off the road in their cars and sneaking up on our clubhouse.
Bongo Snake was riding out at Rosehill on Parramatta Road, not far from their clubhouse, when Leroy in a ute and another carload of them ran him off the road. As with me, his bike ended up on top of him and they gave him a bit of a going-over with baseball bats. Then they did what most bikers would never do – they smashed his bike. Dumped it on top of him and left.
About four days after Bongo Snake was bashed, the back window of my car was shot out in the driveway alongside my house. To me, this was a real low act because it was at my home, endangering Donna and the kids.
The next day I rocked up to their clubhouse at Rosehill and banged on the door but there was no one there. I left a Bandit card with a message on the back that if anyone came near my home again the gloves’d be off and I’d be making house calls myself.
Then we got a visit from the cops. They had a warrant to search our clubhouse for guns. They said the Comanchero clubhouse had been shot up and we were their suspects. It was bullshit. We hadn’t shot them up. They’d obviously done it themselves to set us up and have the cops confiscate any weapons we might have. We didn’t even have any at the club. In those days, guns weren’t a regular part of bike club life.
***
AROUND THIS time, Jock got knocked off his bike by a small truck. I always knew he was going to get into an accident because he had such bad night vision with those thick glasses.
This incident apparently happened in the late afternoon, early evening. For some reason, a couple of cars had broken down at a set of lights on Marsden Road just after he’d gone through, holding up all the traffic. Then another car broke down at the other end of the road. Where this truck came from I don’t know. It just appeared, apparently. I always thought Jock probably just ran into it. But he seemed to think the truck had tried to run him over. If it had it would have saved a lot of problems, but whoever was driving the truck made the wrong decision and swerved around him.
IF ANY good was coming out of the war, it was that I was starting to see who the real hard-core blokes in the club were and who was just along for the ride. Take Davo for example. He took it upon himself to do what I’d done and go out to the Comos clubhouse to front Jock. He’d known Jock a long time and obviously thought he could talk some sense into him. Jock wasn’t there but he fronted Leroy and Sunshine. When he came back and told me what he’d done I thought, While we’ve got staunch members like Davo, this club will keep going.
Through all this, Sheepskin and Leroy kept calling me on the phone to see how I was going. Sometimes I’d call them. We knew that if we ran into each other on the street it would be a punch-on because our clubs were at war, but on a personal level we were still friends.
Leroy and Sheepskin would keep me posted on what the Comos where up to. They never gave me any information that might have helped us beat them, but if there was something that they thought didn’t really matter, or if they felt it was the right thing to do, they’d give me a tingle. They didn’t like the way their club was going about the war. Equally, if some Comos got bashed they’d ring and ask me what the go was. It helped stop the two clubs really blowing up.
In one call I got from Leroy in August he told me that the whole club had been told to get me. He wasn’t being threatening. Just letting me know.
He said that Jock had some T-shirts made up with my picture printed on them. On one batch there was a hammer pointed at my head with the words Hammer Caesar, and on the other batch there was a big nail going into my head with the words Nail Caesar.
Leroy also told me about a stunt the Comos pulled one Saturday night when we were out with our old ladies. He said that after we’d left the clubhouse for our club ride, the Comos had a car with a CB radio follow us to the pub. They waited until we left to return home and radioed ahead to Foghorn, who was parked in his ute with Snowy and some other blokes back at Louisa Road. Foghorn and Snowy then poured a forty-four gallon drum of diesel on the road where they knew we would come flying down the hill into a big sweeping left-hand turn. They were hoping to bring the whole club down on top of each other, old ladies and all. They didn’t give a fuck if old ladies got hurt. As it turned out, we rode straight over it without even noticing.
The diesel plan wasn’t a bad idea. I probably would have done it myself if it had been only blokes that you were going to take out. Leroy had a real soft spot for Donna and didn’t like the idea that she could have been killed, which is why he told me about it.
Things were getting pretty nasty when one day Sheepskin rang. ‘Can I come over to your place – without getting bashed? There’s something serious I need to talk over with you. You’ve got no worries with me. You’ve got me word. All I wanna do is talk.’
‘Yeah, all right.’
So he came over and he had this tall, well-built bloke with him who he introduced to me as his prospect, Pappy.
‘Ceese,’ he said, getting straight down to business, ‘I’ve left the Comos and Pappy’s left with me.’
‘Why?’
‘I got put between a rock and a hard place.’ He said that Jock had come to him and told him that he had to put a hit on me and a hit on Shadow. Sheepskin was really close to both of us. He said he asked Jock why he wanted me and Shadow bumped off rather than Snoddy. ‘Snoddy’s the president,’ he’d said. ‘Why wouldn’t you want him knocked off?’
Jock had said it was me who held the club together and that if I went, the only one who’d step into my spot would be Shadow. ‘If we get rid of both of them, the Band-Aids will fall to pieces.’ They called us Band-Aids.
‘I didn’t even have to think about it,’ Sheepskin told me. ‘I was willing to get into a fist fight with youse for the sake of the Comos but there’s no way I was gunna off ya. I’ve known youse too long. And anyway, I knew if I missed the first time, there wouldn’t be no second chance.’ So Sheepskin said that he turned round to Jock and told him no way. If it was a choice between that or the club, he was leaving. So he left and Pappy went with him.
He said he and Leroy had been trying to end the war but he could see things were about to explode; Foghorn and Snowy were always in Jock’s ear telling him how great he was, feeding his ego, and trying to egg him on to do more.
He admitted to me that the Comos had got a couple of prospects to shoot up their own clubhouse. They fired a few harmless shots into a garage door then Jock rang the cops to say the Bandidos had just driven past and shot at them.
Sheepskin got up to go. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d just come over and tell ya so you can watch your back and you can let Shadow know that there’s a contract out on him too.’
Pappy added, ‘Sheepskin’s right. You wanna watch your back. They’ve got these T-shirts out now with your face on ’em.’
I thanked Sheepskin for coming round. We shook hands and they hopped in the car and took off. I got on the blower to Shadow and told him about it. I said, ‘I’m not gunna call a club meeting, I don’t want to worry the brothers any more than I have to, but you tell Snoddy what Sheepskin had to say.’
‘All right, Ceese, you watch your back.’
‘You do the same.’
***
THINGS WERE building up and some of our blokes were getting restless. They didn’t like the fact that at any time you could be run off the road. After our next club meeting, Shadow, Snoddy and I had an officers’ meeting and we all agreed that if I could arrange it, I’d punch on with Leroy, or whoever they picked, and that the losing club would drop their colours. We knew that even if we won the fight, Jock wouldn’t stick to the agreement, but we knew Leroy would and he had a lot of influence.
So I went to front Jock at their clubhouse, but he wasn’t there. I spoke to Leroy and Sparra instead.
‘Let’s put an end to all this shit,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just punch on, you and me. You’ve always thought you could beat me, and I know I can beat you. The loser drops their colours.’
That stirred him right up like I knew it would.
‘I’ll take you on,’ he said.
‘There’ll just be me and you and one other bloke from each club.’
‘All right, I’ll put it up to Jock.’
‘Can’t ya make the decision yourself? You’re the sergeant-at-arms.’
‘The Comos aren’t run like you run the Bandits. I’ve gotta ask Jock.’
So he went away and got back to me a while later. Jock had said no way. It was guerilla warfare. And that was that.
BY THIS time, a lot of members had stopped riding their bikes and wearing their colours. It was just too dangerous. But I always rode my Harley-Davidson Wide Glide and wore my deck. I wasn’t going to let anyone intimidate me. I was riding to the clubhouse the next Saturday with Donna on the back as usual, when we came down to the bay at Haberfield. As we approached the rowing club, I heard a couple of gunshots. A few moments later, I smelt petrol and felt a dampness on my leg.
I gunned the bike over a little bridge where the road went up the hill to Lilyfield, then pulled over. The right leg of my jeans was saturated in petrol. I looked at the tank and saw a bullet hole. It was a small calibre .22 or a .223. Luckily, I’d just filled up with petrol, so even though the bullet hit high up on the tank, it went through petrol. If I’d only had half a tank it would have gone through fumes and that would have been a lot more dangerous.
I leant the bike over and poured some petrol out of the tank onto the ground. Donna had some chewing gum which I stuck into the hole. ‘From now on we’ll have to go a different way to the clubhouse,’ I said, kicking myself because I should have known it was a dangerous spot to ride through at night, with the bay on one side and the park on the other.
We got back on and rode to the clubhouse, where I got the bike into the garage and had a good look over her. That’s when I got the biggest shock of the night – I found a bullet hole through the seat Donna had been sitting on. That freaked her out a bit and it wound me up something fierce.
I rode the bike home, grabbed an eight-shot pumpy, threw it in the boot of my old V8 XR Falcon and drove back to the clubhouse. I was spewing that they’d taken a shot at Donna. Dead set, if I’d run into any Como that night I would have blown his head off. Hang the consequences. If I’d run into six or seven of them, they were all going to the cemetery. And if there were fifteen and I had time to reload I would’ve done them too. If someone wants to go all the way with me, killing them doesn’t worry me one bit.
Back at the clubhouse, everyone was on a short fuse, especially now they knew the Comos didn’t give a fuck about whether your old ladies were with you or not. I said, ‘You blokes should have known that from when they put the diesel on the road.’
I grabbed Snoddy and Shadow and said, ‘I think a few of the fellas are losing a bit of heart. We’re going to have to do something to gee them up a bit.’ There were a few blokes who Snoddy and I thought were going to hand in their colours. He wanted to have a morale booster to make the blokes who were on the point of leaving think, ‘Nah, this is too good a club to leave.’
‘What if we bring the anniversary of the club forward?’ I said. The club had started on 22 November and it was now only August, but we’d been at the Louisa Road clubhouse for twelve months and I thought it would really pick the guys up to have something to celebrate.
Snoddy said it was a good idea, and Shadow agreed. They left it up to me to arrange for a big cake to be made with Bandidos Australia First Anniversary written across it.
It worked a treat. When I brought the cake to the clubhouse the next meeting night and everyone saw it, they were rapt. Me and Snoddy held the knife together and cut the first slice. It was just what the brothers needed to lift their spirits. It had the right effect – although over time it created the mistaken idea that the club started in August 1983.
The real hard-core brothers in the club didn’t need a cake to pep them up. You only had to look in their eyes. They always had the same look; nothing fazed them. I think a few of my brothers were even enjoying the war. I said to Kid Rotten, ‘This is like an anniversary for you, it’s nearly a year since you changed your name from Animal to Kid Rotten.’
Kid said, ‘Well I didn’t want anything that reminded me that I was a Como. Animal was my Como name.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said.
IN THE next couple of weeks it got pretty hairy. With all the shooting going on I put some barbed wire round the front of my house, mainly so that if the Comos decided to turn up en masse there was something to slow them down while I got Donna and the kids out the back door or into the back room which I’d reinforced with sandbags.
Back in them days, outlaw clubs didn’t have guns around. There was a culture of stand-up toe-to-toe fighting. If you got thumped, you got thumped. People didn’t try to square up with guns. And in all the time I’d been riding, I’d never known of anyone from an outlaw club going to the coppers until Jock called them on us. Things have changed now. It’s gone from fists and knives to guns. And drive-bys on blokes’ homes have become the norm.
But all this was very unusual back in 1984. I only had that eight-shot pump-action shotgun because it had been offered to me at a good price. The only time I had ever had any reason to use it was when we went pig hunting. A couple of my brothers were right into the pig hunting. They’d go once every three months or so and I went with them a few times and just destroyed the pigs with this thing.
THE WAR had been escalating through August. On the twenty-fourth, Wack drove his car past a Como house. He didn’t know it was a Como house, it was just a coincidence, but inside, someone recognised him. One of them followed Wack down to Shadow’s place and went back to get the others.
Three carloads pulled up – led by Jock’s brother-in-law, Glen Eaves – and let fly. There were bullets going through the front door and the windows. Shadow shot back and the Comos took off. Shadow and Wack then chased them through a few suburbs to someone’s house. Shadow and Wack pulled up and told the Condoms to get out, threatening to punch their heads in. With that the Comos let fly again and Shadow ended up with a few bullet holes in his car. He headed home and found his old lady in a real mess. The cops were there and wanted to know what had happened.
Shadow just told them a couple of cars had pulled up out the front and the blokes in them had started shooting. He said when they took off he chased them but stopped when they started shooting at his car. The cop went over and looked at Shadow’s car. ‘You’re mighty lucky.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ Shadow said.
Shadow went inside and got on the blower to Snoddy and me. Snoddy was really upset because he and Shadow were as close as any two blokes could be. Snoddy called a special meeting and said that all this shit had to stop.
Afterwards, Mouth – the member whose vote I’d abstained from – called Snoddy, Shadow and me aside. Mouth said he’d been practising at the back of his property in Galston and reckoned he could put a bullet into the front wheel of a bike travelling at any speed. He suggested he take out Jock’s front wheel and bring him down.
It sounded okay to me. ‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s just Jock,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to go along with it if they’ve got their old ladies with ’em.’
‘Well they’ve been doing it to us,’ he said.
‘Just because they do it to us doesn’t mean we have to sink as low as them.’
Snoddy agreed. ‘If you can do it and there’s no old ladies or kids involved, have a go.’
But funnily, when Mouth got the go-ahead, he suddenly decided it was a bad idea. As usual, he was all piss and wind.
‘I don’t think I could kill anyone,’ he said.
‘You get over it,’ I said. ‘It’s only the first one that’s hard.’