As I started to recover I began to think about forming another chapter of the Bandidos. I wanted a bunch of blokes out there that would do anything to defend the club’s name. Almost all the blokes I’d been riding with were locked up. And I didn’t trust Mouth. So ever since I’d heard about the Griffith chapter, I’d been thinking about getting my own going.
I would kick it off with a couple of prospects and I would be president. I could’ve started the chapter by myself but I wanted to do it properly. I’d never used the fact I was sergeant-at-arms – or that I’d worn the first set of colours in Australia – to get my way. I always went along with what the majority of the club voted, even if I didn’t like it. So I sent my brother Wheels to Parklea to ask Snoddy if it was all right with him.
Snoddy knew I wasn’t too happy about the Griffith chapter being patched up so he gave me the go ahead.
One of the first blokes I got in was Sheepskin. He’d been ringing me ever since he left the Comos in the weeks before the ambush. And when I was in hospital he sent cards. Donna said that he also rocked up each week to check she was all right. He’d said to her, ‘Tell Ceese if there’s anything I can do for him, or if there’s anyone he wants taken care of, I’ll do it.’ So there was him, plus my former brother-in-law, Lurch, who’d been a Gladiator, my brother Wheels and my mates Pancho, who was an ex-Hells Angel, and Russell. Roach joined up from jail and later Sparksy and my brother Snake came over too.
During this time, I was talking to the president and sergeant-at-arms of an outlaw club in Victoria. The sergeant had been a big help in letting me know what was going on. Like, he told me how they were at a party with the Griffith Bandidos and Mouth was there telling everyone how he’d been to the States to see the Bandidos over there. And how when the Bandido from the States had come out to see how we were going, the only Bandido he saw was him – implying that he, Mouth, was the main man and that Snoddy and I didn’t count any more. The other club thought it was a bit funny that he would be discussing club business and running down other members in front of everyone.
After checking around, I found out where Mouth was living and got a phone number. I rang him and told him, ‘You go round bad-mouthing me to anyone, I’ll rip your colours off your back. Not just for bad-mouthing me, but if you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing you’re a bigger arsehole than what you look.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I know you’ve been rooting Joanne. I know you did it not long after Shadow was buried. I also know you’re rooting ______ [another member’s old lady] too while her fella’s locked up. You were supposed to be really tight with the bloke.’
Mouth denied it.
‘You can deny it all you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve got people out there who know. So you’ve got two choices. I come round your place and take your colours, or you hand them in.’
Mouth just disappeared after that. As far as I’m concerned he stopped being a Bandido that day. No one has seen him round the club since.
IT WAS 28 April 1985, almost eight months after the ambush. Donna and I were watching the news, but I wish I hadn’t been. It came up that the president of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, Anthony ‘Snoddy’ Spencer, had committed suicide in Parklea prison.
After about an hour of just sitting there blankly in front of the box, Donna said, ‘Why do you think he did it?’
I thought there were probably a couple of reasons. He probably blamed himself for Shadow and Chop’s deaths and having the club end up where it did. And he wasn’t stupid, he knew what had happened to Shadow’s old lady. That would have added to his torment.
I wish he hadn’t done it. Snoddy gave up his life when he had it there to live. I had two brothers who died for the club. I was pissed off with Snoddy for doing what he did, but then again, I’d never been to jail so I couldn’t understand what was going through his brain. I just wish he’d have waited.
I had got word to him that I was eventually going to hand myself in. I knew my duty was to be inside with my brothers so I could take care of them. But I didn’t want to go to jail until my arm was strong enough for me to look after myself. I wasn’t going to put myself at the mercy of halfwit standover men inside. I know if I’d been there with him he probably wouldn’t have done it. But as the old saying goes, shit happens.
A FEW weeks after Snoddy’s death, Donna went to the little shopping centre in Hill Top to buy some hot chips when, wouldn’t you know it, she ran into someone who knew us – Bushy. He was an original Bandido who had left the club when the war got too hot. She came back and told me, all upset that he might ring the cops.
‘I don’t reckon he will,’ I said.
‘But you never know.’
I knew Bushy wouldn’t have handed me in, but I knew that he would probably tell someone and they’d probably tell someone else, and word would eventually get out. While I wasn’t trying too hard to avoid the law, it didn’t mean I wanted to get caught. So next thing I knew, Donna was on the blower to Pancho and Cheryl, who had just moved to Perth. We decided we’d move there too – immediately. Just a day or two earlier, one of my brothers had given us an XC 351 Ford panel van to use in case of an emergency. We threw as much stuff into it as Donna could manage, plus one of our three dogs, and within the hour we were ready to go. Chane was with us and it was a tearful goodbye, leaving him behind.
Donna couldn’t drive then so I had to do it all. We slept in the car – the two adults, two kids, the dog Buck and all the gear. You could never get comfortable with a fan sticking in your ribs or someone else squirming about. Donna was still bottle feeding Lacey. It was a tough trip, so monotonous, but we did it in four and a half days. We arrived at Bayswater, Perth, where Cheryl was waiting for us and we followed her back to their place. Our friends put us up for about three weeks, then we rented a place a few blocks away at Shakespeare Street, Mount Hawthorn. We signed the lease in my name. We enrolled Daniel in school. Donna got a job in the classifieds department at the Western Mail newspaper. She used to work at the Telegraph in Sydney so she knew her stuff, and after only about three weeks there they made her a supervisor and later a manager.
It was still my intention to hand myself in when I got strong enough. Pancho came around just about every day to help me train so I could get the muscle back in my right arm, which was still a withered mess.
JUST BEFORE Christmas 1985, thirteen months after the committal hearing had begun, it finished with forty Bandits and Comos committed to stand trial for murder. Only two of the forty-two who’d been charged weren’t sent for trial – Snoddy and my brother Wack.
Wack had been crook ever since Milperra. After all the surgeries and everything he just never recovered.
They still put him in Parklea, but for about six or seven months he complained of chest pains and not feeling right. They only had nurses on there most of the time; a doctor came in once a fortnight or something. He was looking about eighty years old and way past his use-by date. The nurse kept telling Wack that he just had bronchitis. Finally he got so crook they sent him into Prince Henry Hospital and he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. His heart was swelling and getting too big for his chest. The specialist told him that if he’d come in six months earlier he would’ve been able to do something. He was put on the waiting list for a heart transplant and was positioned near the top of the list. But then one day he rocked up at the hospital with a Bandidos T-shirt on, and a couple of the nurses said, ‘Oh, you’re one of those blokes from Milperra, are you?’
‘Yeah.’
The next thing we knew he’d been dropped down the waiting list.
There hadn’t been much in the Perth papers about the committal hearing so I didn’t know a lot about it. Even so, I was surprised that the Bandits didn’t get off. I thought the Comos would go down because they’d turned up with shotguns and waited for us with walkietalkies and the whole lot. They’d obviously come there with the intention of committing a crime. We’d gone there with the intention of buying some bike parts and watching a band. I mean, did the magistrate honestly think that we’d gone there to shoot up all these people with the plan of then turning round to ride back to my young fella’s birthday party, where ten cars could pull up in the street straight alongside our backyard and empty as many shotguns as they wanted into our women and children?
Suddenly, it looked like the club was going to go to jail for a long time. Snoddy was dead. I started to feel weak that I was out while they were all inside. We needed to keep the guys strong and together. They needed a leader.
My arm was still a long way off being any good for fighting, but, being big-headed, I figured I was better with one arm than most blokes with two, so I decided I was going to hand myself in.
I talked it over with Donna then got my mum and my sister, Patricia, to get me a QC. Patricia put me on to Dr Greg Woods. I’d heard of him, so I agreed with that. I spoke to him and we made arrangements that I’d come back, meet him and hand myself in. We started trying to arrange for a place for Donna and the kids to stay in Sydney.
It was a stinking hot summer in Perth. One afternoon, a few days after we started making plans to come back, I was out on the front verandah, watching my bull terrier Buck run around and do his business.
Unbeknown to me, a bloke had broken out of the Perth lock-up that day and as it happened his parents lived in the same street as us. So three or four blokes from the Consorting Squad decided to pay his parents a visit. The only cops in Western Australia who had a photo of me just happened to be the Consorting Squad. They drove right by and nothing happened.
But around five o’clock the next morning, 18 February 1986, Donna and I were lying on a double mattress on the lounge room floor – because it was cooler in there than in the bedroom – when we heard a dirty great banging on the front door. She thought it was the Comos. I looked out the window and saw coppers everywhere, shotguns, flak jackets, navy blue jumpsuits.
The pounding on the door continued as they tried to batter it down. But the door at the front of the house had been put on backwards, so they were actually bashing the door where the hinges were. They were really struggling. Bang bang bang. It gave me time to get into my trackies and put on a singlet while Donna went and got the kids. I was waiting in the lounge room for them when they burst in. The first one came running at me with a shotgun like he was going to hit me in the head with it. I still couldn’t use my right arm but let him have one with the left and dropped him.
Maybe I should have gone peacefully, but that’s just me. If someone comes running at me, I just go off. If they’d knocked on the door and said, ‘Are you Colin Caesar Campbell?’ I would have just said, ‘Yeah.’ But not now.
Bang. I dropped another one, then kicked another in the ribs. I put down about six or seven of them before one copper yelled out, ‘If you don’t stop there could be an accident.’ I looked over and here was this copper with a shotgun pointed at my young bloke Daniel’s head. ‘If you don’t calm down this gun could go off.’ And then another copper stepped up and pointed one at Donna.
‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘Youse have got me.’
The lounge room was filling up with coppers and then four Ds came in.
‘You’re Colin Caesar Campbell?’ the head detective said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you step over here?’
I remained on guard but stepped over to the corner of the lounge room with him, and he spoke calmly.
‘If you quieten down and cooperate with us, I’ll guarantee you that nothing will happen to your wife or kids. They won’t be charged.
‘I’m not making any statements.’
‘Well, we’ll talk about that later.’ So two coppers came over and tried handcuffing me but my right arm wouldn’t go round my back. I kept telling them I couldn’t move it. The detective said, ‘Don’t put his hands behind his back. Handcuff them in front.’
He was being extra nice.
‘Will you let my wife make one phone call?’ I asked.
‘No.’
Some of the coppers went to go out the back door. I tried to stop them. ‘Don’t go out there. The dog’ll eat ya.’
They went out anyway and Buck was straight into them. He latched onto one copper’s leg and once a bull terrier latches on, that’s it. The way Donna told it to me was that Buck knocked this copper over and swung himself around so that the bulk of the dog’s body was on top of the copper. The other five officers out there couldn’t shoot him because they’d most likely hit their mate. So they just laid into him with the butts of their shotguns. Donna eventually got him off and let him out the back gate so there wouldn’t be any more trouble. I used to take him for a walk every afternoon up to Pancho’s place so he ran straight there. Pancho saw the blood dripping off him and knew something was wrong, so he flew down to our place.
By the time he got there I’d been taken away.
THE DS took me into the cop shop and were nice as pie. They offered me sandwiches and a soft drink and were all chatty. They wanted to know what had happened on the day of the ambush. I told them I wasn’t saying or signing anything. They had me there for about eight or nine hours when a D walked in and said, ‘Your mate’s downstairs. He says he’s not leaving till he sees ya.’
So they let Pancho up to see me and Donna was with him. She gave me a big hug and Pancho asked how I was going.
‘As good as can be expected.’
‘Are they belting ya?’
‘Not so far.’
The cops let Donna give me my medication then ushered her and Pancho out.
‘Well, if you’re not going to sign anything,’ they said, ‘you’re going down to the cells.’
Four uniformed coppers came and took me down into the bowels of the building. They walked me into a cell and handcuffed me to the bars at the front. Two of them grabbed hold of one leg each while the other two came up close to my body. Whump. The first guy hit me once. Then whump, the second one had a go. They started taking turns, whacking me in the back, in the side of the head, up under the arm. My right arm was killing me but they were only young blokes and I wasn’t going to give in to them.
‘My grandmother can hit harder than you,’ I said. That didn’t go down too well and I thought to myself, Why don’t you keep your big mouth shut?
Then the two that were holding my legs said they wanted their go at the big bad bikie. So they swapped over and the fresh pair started using me as their punching bag.
I kept egging them on so they kept laying in. I didn’t know how much more I could take, but then an older woman walked into the cell. She must have been approaching sixty, looked like a secretary, but at the sight of her these young coppers sprang to attention.
‘What do you think you’re up to?’ she snapped, looking me over and seeing blood on my head. ‘The four of you out of this cell. If I see any of you with this man again you’ll all be up at Geraldton by the next morning.’ I didn’t have a clue where Geraldton was but she made it sound like a pretty bad place to be.
She grabbed two sergeants – one male, one female – and said, ‘I’m going to leave this gentleman in your care. If he gets even one more scratch on him, you two will be going to Geraldton.’
Everything was sweet after that. The female sergeant would bring me Hungry Jack’s burgers and thick shakes, the whole bit. The Ds kept being nice to me. They’d bring me up from the cells each day for about an hour and a half and put me in a room upstairs. They let Donna and the kids in. This head detective kept saying to me, ‘See how good coppers are? We’re not as bad as people think.’
‘Oh yeah, what about the beating I copped down in the cells?’ I said to him.
‘Oh, I heard about that. They were only young fellas, new to the force.’
There was another D playing bad cop and he said to me one time, ‘You better cooperate or else you know what we can do to you.’
‘Youse have already done it,’ I said.
I spent about five days in the cells waiting for two Ds from New South Wales to rock up. Then I was put before the court and charged with one count of murder – that of my own brother, Shadow. I was gutted. You couldn’t hurt me any more. Apparently the coppers had decided that the way they were going to lock all of us up for a very long time was to make a case that we had a common purpose: that we were basically all co-conspirators to the events in the car park that day and that, therefore, we were all responsible for all seven deaths. So they were charging everyone who was there with all seven murders, but for the extradition they kept it simple and only used one. They could have chosen any of the deaths to hit me with but they were obviously trying to get some sort of a reaction out of me by charging me with killing Shadow.
The hearing was just a formality and I didn’t fight it. But then none of the airlines wanted to take me. There were stories in the Perth papers about how the airlines were afraid of retaliation from my brothers. I asked one of the coppers what the problem was.
‘They’ve all read the papers about how Caesar Campbell was the standover man for the Bandidos,’ he said. ‘And how you had a secret graveyard in the Snowy Mountains where you’ve been burying bodies for over twenty years.’
‘What a load of shit,’ I said. ‘It’s only been fifteen years.’
IT LOOKED like I was going to be returning by train, but then at the last minute one of the airlines agreed to fly me. It was quite a relief because I didn’t want to have to spend three days handcuffed to a copper.
I was allowed to change into my own clothes. So I was dressed in the usual black jeans, black boots, shirt, bandana and sunnies. I was put in an unmarked van full of cops and taken to the airport. The head of airport security wanted to meet me, so I had to go through that. Then they walked me out through a big hangar. We stopped about every thirty feet until someone said, ‘Clear’, then we’d go the next thirty feet. This went all the way from the hangar to the back of the plane where there were about twenty coppers standing with guns. I was led up the stairway at the back of the plane, then plonked into the middle of the very back row of seats. I had one detective handcuffed to my right hand and one to my left. This was going to be a great flight.
They let the other passengers on and we hadn’t been in the air long when one of the Ds turned to me and said they had an offer to make me. ‘If you help us out, we can give you a grand a week and relocation to anywhere in the world – with a new identity.’
‘No way, shove it up your arses,’ I said.
‘How about a hundred thousand dollars up front, a thousand a week and the relocation?’
‘I’m not talking to you.’
‘You know Bernie’s already rolled over on you.’
‘Yeah, I know what the cunt’s done.’
‘Well he’s only getting fifty thousand, and five hundred a week. We’re offering you double.’
‘You can offer me a million dollars, I’m not turning on anyone in me club. I started the club. I can’t wait to be back with me brothers. What you coppers and straights don’t understand about outlaw clubs is that we live for the brotherhood. We live for the loyalty and honour of being there for each other no matter what. There is not a thing you can offer me, nothing you can do to me. I was the first to wear Bandido colours in Australia and you will never know what that means or feels like.’
They ordered something to eat but didn’t get me anything, mongrels. I was starving.
With the handcuffs on, my hands had to move with their hands as they ate. So every time they lifted up the hand that I was cuffed to, I happened to have to sneeze or scratch my ear; I’d jerk my hand and food would go everywhere so that both of them ended up with spills over their shirts and on their trousers. They gave the meals back half-eaten.
They kept on at me about the deal. Said I could go anywhere in Australia or to England, Canada, New Zealand. A thousand dollars a week was a lot of money back then. They said they might even be able to get me a fair sum more up front and in the bank.
‘There’s no way I’m gunna do what that cocksucker Bernie did. I’m not giving up me brothers.’
If I’d been asked who I thought would have ratted on the club, I wouldn’t have picked Bernie. I thought he’d stay staunch. But, like I’ve said to other blokes, I can kind of understand where he was coming from.
The cops had Bernie for ten days and they moved him from cop shop to cop shop so no solicitor could get near him. And his missus, Caroline, hated the club. She was a real north shore tennis type and they’d just had a son. Apparently she threatened Bernie that it was either the club or her and the son. I know I’d tell them to punch it. But after ten days of being pounded and having your missus coming in and telling you it’s your son or the club, I can see the pressure he was under. At least I know Donna would never put me in that situation. Even so, I could never have ratted on the club. Every morning you’ve got to get up and look at yourself in the mirror.
AS WE approached Sydney Airport, the jacks said, ‘When we land, just sit here and don’t move. We’re going to be last off the plane. Be as inconspicuous as you can.’
The plane landed, the door at the front opened. I don’t think a single person had got off before a great herd of Tactical Response Group coppers came running down the aisle with shotguns.
I turned to the two Ds. ‘This is being inconspicuous, is it?’
We went out through the back of the plane. There were probably twenty-five coppers on the tarmac, vans everywhere, carloads of Ds. I was bundled into a van and taken to Waverley Court and put in a cell, still in handcuffs. A copper from the Homicide Squad came up to me and said, ‘I’m going to offer you the deal one more time – a new house, a thousand dollars a week.’
I told him to stick it up his arse so he gave me a few thumps. I told him he hit like a girl. I always had to have the last word. He took a few more swings until one of the coppers outside yelled, ‘They want him up in court.’
I was taken up to the courtroom. It was just a formality and the magistrate remanded me to Parklea prison. Then back downstairs and into the van. I could see the TRG blokes getting into a van in front and others getting into a van behind. A trail of police cars joined in.
My mind was running through what it might be like in jail. I’d never been in one before. I’d only had that one charge from when Irene’s boyfriend fell off the roof.
I wondered what the guards would be like. I’d heard all the stories. But I figured they’d probably be like cops: there’d be some bad ones and some good ones. Well, what can they do? I thought to myself. Give me a thumping? You’ve had plenty of people try that before. I figured I’d let them know that if they tried to thump me they were going to cop it back in spades. I’d also tell them: ‘You be fair with me and I’ll be fair with you.’
We eventually pulled up and I could hear someone saying, ‘You’re going to have to hand your guns in, boys. We can’t let you through the gate with those.’ We were at Parklea. There was a long wait as all these coppers handed in their guns. Finally a gate opened and the truck drove through, turned around and backed up, beeping, into a dock.
The van door opened and I stood up, all in black with the sunglasses and the bandana. Lined up in front of me, to the left and right, was a big line of Tactical Response Group coppers in black pyjamas, helmets and bullet-proof vests. Black batons raised. It was like they were waiting for the Incredible Hulk.
Life had just taken a whopping great turn.
But that’s a whole other story, which I may or may not tell . . . one day.