The day I got away from the hospital, the coppers were at pains to tell the press that I hadn’t actually escaped. ‘We want to stress that Colin Campbell was not under police guard himself,’ they said. ‘He had not been charged with anything and was perfectly entitled to sign himself out of hospital as he did. The police guard at Bankstown Hospital is for the safety and security of patients and staff.’ Could have fooled me.
They tried to scare Donna by telling the papers that if I didn’t get medical help I’d probably die; that I could only get the strength of antibiotic I needed in hospital. There was probably a bit of truth in it, but I wasn’t going back. I was not going to go to jail for being the victim of an ambush that had killed my brothers.
Pancho and his missus, Cheryl, had set up a room for me with a double mattress and air conditioning that could point straight at me. I was still running the huge fever. Donna and Cheryl went from doctor to doctor all over Sydney complaining of infections, sore throats, coughing and spluttering, dizzy spells and pleurisy to get antibiotics for me.
They should have won Oscars for their performances. They just kept getting those pills, whatever type they could get hold of, and shovelled them into me. I was doing about twenty-five pills a day.
I might have been on the run, but we weren’t really hiding too hard. My eldest sons Chane and Lee would visit me a couple of times a week. My brother Wheels kept in touch over the phone. That’s how I found out that a Bandit from the States had come out to try and see either Snoddy or myself. But Mouth – who was one of the few Bandits who was free because of his mystery illness on the day of the ambush – had met the American and told him there was no way he could talk to us because it was too dangerous to meet me or go into Parklea jail where Snoddy and the others had been locked up. So we never got to see this Bandido. Mouth kept the guy away from everyone.
Snoddy smuggled a letter out of Parklea to me, telling me that Mouth wanted to make all the blokes from Griffith members – patching them straight away with no prospect time. I didn’t like the idea. I only knew the names of about four of those blokes and I’d only met them once when they’d come to a party at the clubhouse in Balmain. But with Mouth putting the pressure on Snoddy, and me not being able to see him, Snoddy agreed to patch them. The concession I got from Snoddy was that if I wanted to start a chapter some time down the track, I could.
***
TWENTY-FIVE DAYS after I escaped, we heard that Bernie had been arrested. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t be staunch like all the other blokes had been. The closest the cops had got to getting a statement out of any of us was when Big Tony got arrested. He’d been on the run a few months when he’d put an ad in the paper trying to sell his car. Somehow the coppers knew it was him and these two blokes turned up to buy the car and wanted to go for a test drive. So Tony took them for a spin and all of a sudden cop cars turned up from everywhere blocking their path and one of these blokes pulled a gun and put it to Tony’s head: ‘You’re under arrest.’ Tony turned around and said, ‘I s’pose this means you don’t wanna buy the car.’
They had Kid Rotten in the cop shop for hour after hour, threatening him with everything if he didn’t make a statement. He refused. They did that to everyone to some extent: ‘You’re gunna go to jail for life. You’re gunna lose your family.’ But no one had given a statement or signed anything. Unlike the Comos.
So it came as a bit of a surprise when the committal hearing started – two weeks after Bernie’s capture – and on the second day they rolled out Bernie as the star witness. He’d done a deal with the prosecution. He spent days on the stand telling them everything he knew. He confirmed to the court that we weren’t armed, and that we were all going back to Daniel’s birthday party afterwards, but he threw in some wobblies as well.
I was getting messages from my brother Wheels – who wasn’t a Bandido at that time but would later join – who was going to the hearing each day at Penrith court. Wheels rang me one night and said that Bernie had been asked what he thought of me.
Wheels explained, ‘He started off making you sound like you weren’t a bad bloke. Like, he said you always kept the peace within the club, and he said you kept the peace between our club and other clubs.’ According to Wheels, Bernie said I never went looking for fights, but that if there was a fight on I always finished them. And that I made it my job to make sure no member in the club got hurt. Which all sounded good, but then Bernie turned round out of the blue and told the magistrate, ‘Oh, but Caesar’s got a secret graveyard down in the Snowy Mountains.’
Wheels said the magistrate, Greg Glass, looked at Bernie a bit surprised and Bernie blurted out, ‘Caesar is a contract killer on the side.’ I don’t know where he got that idea from, but it went into the court records, which I wasn’t too happy about.
WE’D BEEN staying at Pancho and Cheryl’s place for a while and I didn’t want to get them into shit if the coppers found me. So in early 1985 I asked Pancho to find me a place somewhere down near Bowral in the Southern Highlands south of Sydney. It was still close to my family, and Donna would have people around who could help her. So he found a joint at Hill Top and it turned out to be a nice little place. He got my dogs for me and brought them down. And that’s what I mean when I say the cops mustn’t have tried very hard to find me. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t on the run. I’d done nothing wrong. We rented this place in my name. Donna was on the pension in the name of Donna Campbell. She’d go into Mittagong to do the shopping, and come back in a taxi. All they had to do was check where she was picking up her pension, or check the realestate agents. I could’ve found myself in a week.
My son Lee, who was then fourteen and a half, used to come down to visit for weeks at a time. He’d do the cloak-and-dagger thing, catching a few different buses then the train, and we’d have someone pick him up at Bowral.
We went though some hard times at Hill Top. Donna was carrying the world on her back. And being out of the city, it was much harder to find different doctors for her antibiotics performances. Here I was, flat on my back, for the first time counting on someone else to look out for me. It had always been the other way around – I looked out for everyone else. My whole right side was fucked, my right lung had four big holes in it. I could not lift my arm for months. All I could do was lie on the bed. But with Donna’s help I started to get the arm working. She put a small tin of baked beans in a plastic bag which I used to do arm curls. Over time, I worked my way up to a big Coke bottle. All the time I knew she was worrying that I was trying too hard. She also knew what I had on my mind.
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.