Since returning to Sydney I’d been keeping my eye on the outlaw motorcycle scene, hoping to find a club I liked. A lot of bikers from different clubs hung round the Cross – it was neutral territory – and I got to know a fair few of them. There were no real big clubs at the time, just a lot of smaller ones like the Executioners and Corporation of Sin. None of them took my fancy so Irene’s brother, Lurch, said to me, ‘Why don’t we start our own club?’
‘Yeah, why don’t we?’
We sat down and thought about a name and came up with Gladiators. ‘That’d be a good name,’ Lurch said, ‘because you’re Caesar, and Caesar used to be in charge of the gladiators.’
We checked round the area to see if the name was taken. It wasn’t, so I designed a patch – ‘the colours’ – with a gladiator sticking his sword into a tiger raised up on its hind legs. We made it blue with maroon lettering, then had it drawn up and embroidered, and sewn onto our leather vests (the deck, or cut-off). I also had the colours tattooed onto my back. By then I was growing my hair real long and had the beard.
The Gladiators officially started up in July 1969, with me as president and Lurch as vice-president. Lurch was a pretty wild-looking bloke, even bigger than me and with nearly 500 tattoos. Even his ears and face were tattooed.
Our territory took in the inner-western suburbs of Ashfield and Five Dock, plus we shared Burwood with Corporation of Sin, because I’d become mates with their president, Les Markham, up at the Venus Room in the Cross and he was a top bloke. Our pub was the Illinois at Five Dock.
The Gladiators didn’t bother with initiation ceremonies or anything like that. I’ve always been of the opinion that you don’t need a whole lot of rules to run a club. The main rules were honour, courage and you didn’t do the wrong thing by your brother. Being in a motorbike club in those days wasn’t about money and who had the bigger house. It was about the fun of riding together and the honour of the brotherhood. So we stuck to those three rules, and everyone understood what they meant. You knew by honour that you didn’t go round picking on straights. Honour meant you didn’t give up your brother. If a bloke wore the same colours as you, you honoured him, and that included honouring his old lady. I found in some clubs that members used to put shit on other members’ old ladies. That’s not good for club morale and it’s putting down your brother.
You knew by courage that you never let your brother down, you always backed him up no matter what. There could be forty blokes wanting to punch on and just you and two of your brothers, but you stayed there till the end. You might end up in hospital with your head kicked in but you never left your brother.
And you knew that doing the right thing by your brother meant that you didn’t rip him off in a deal over a bike and you never tried to crack on to his old lady.
An outlaw club in those days was really strict, and its members more honourable than the normal straight; if a member did something really wrong he’d be kicked out of the club. Contrary to popular opinion, clubs just didn’t tolerate members going round raping sheilas or bashing blokes who were walking down the street with their missus and kids. You’d have to have a good reason to front the club if you got into a blue with anyone, and rules were strictly enforced.
THE CAMPBELL family continued to grow later that year when my brother Shadow’s good mate came to live with us. Chop was sixteen and had been kicked out of home eighteen months earlier. He’d been living on the streets, sleeping in parks and bus shelters. We were living at Lethbridge Park in Sydney’s outer west by then, and when Mum heard Chop’s story she asked him to move in. It didn’t worry her having another mouth to feed; he just got thrown into one of the bunks and became another brother. It was like he was making up for the son Mum had lost after birth.
From the get-go we all considered Chop one of us, but he had his doubts, so we went through the blood-brother ceremony like in the westerns. Everyone cut their hand, and I mean a decent cut. I still have the scar today. Chop cut his, and we mixed the blood. Then we all dripped some blood into a cup and Chop drank it. Well after that he had Campbell blood running through him and that made him as much a Campbell as the rest of us. He considered himself a true family member. He started calling himself Mark Campbell, and when he turned eighteen he officially changed his name. Whenever anyone mentioned his life before he joined the Campbells he would go right off the deep end. I saw him flatten people over it. And you didn’t want to make Chop mad because although he was short, he was thick-set with muscles on his muscles, and when he got into a fight, he liked to bite his opponent’s ear off. Even if he knocked a bloke out cold, he wasn’t happy till he’d taken that ear. He’d bend down, chomp it off and spit it into the gutter. Hence the name Chop.
My own little family was growing too, with the birth of another son, Lee, followed later by two daughters, Peggy and Samantha. I loved spending time with the kids, but Irene was another story, so most of my days were taken up working and with the Gladiators.
AS EACH of my brothers got his licence, he came into the Gladiators. First up was Wheels, who was the strongest of the brothers, six foot six and 140 kilos. One time he held up a V8 ute while I changed the tyre. Then came Bull, big and strong with a chest as broad as a bull’s. He was a hard one to set off, but if you did set him off you were in trouble. Next up was Shadow. He was real quiet, a lot like me. As a kid he was always following me around, which is why the old man called him Shadow. Dad used to say me and Shadow were the nicest of the lot but, once provoked, we became the nastiest.
Chop joined up of course, and then Snake, who was a real bad-tempered bastard. You got on the wrong side of Snake and you were in for a great deal of pain. And then there was Wack, the youngest to join (although we also had an even younger brother, Christopher). He was another quiet one, but we called him Wack because he could drop you with either hand.
We were over at the Ashfield Tavern one night when Chop got into a blue with one of the bouncers. The Ashfield Tavern was a bit of a slaughterhouse at the time and Chop got glassed in the back. Luckily it was only in the shoulder, but he was spewing. It would’ve been on, but the cops turned up so we hit the toe.
We went back two nights later looking for the bouncer – me, Chop, Bull and Wack. This bouncer was just coming in to work, and Chop went straight up to him, bang. Knocked him down to the ground, jumped on top of him, and started smashing into him. Bull and I thought Chop was going to kill this bloke so we tried to pull him off. I had one arm and a leg, Bull had the other arm and leg. We were pulling him up, but of course Chop had sunk his teeth right into the bloke’s ear and jaw. Latched on like a bull terrier and wasn’t letting go. So as we were trying to pull him off, the bloke was actually coming up off the ground in Chop’s mouth. We tried to shake Chop loose but all we ended up doing was shaking him that much that the bloke’s ear came off in Chop’s mouth. Bloody Chop got up, spat it out, gave the bouncer another kick in the ribs, and we were away.
I NEVER went out of my way to look for fights. My old man always taught me that the blokes who can really fight don’t go looking for fights; they don’t have to prove how good they are because they know how good they are. But there are some fights you can’t walk away from: if someone really puts it on you, they insult your wife or your family or your club, you need to defend your honour. And when you’ve got the hair and the tatts and the leathers, fights seem to come looking for you. All these blokes want to take on the big bad bikie. There were times when I’d cross the road because I saw blokes coming and I knew there was going to be a blue. They could be seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kids, pissed, and I could never see the point in beating up someone you knew you could beat.
One day at the Illinois, there was a little bloke about five foot nine, sixty kilos. He had his missus with him, but for some reason he was looking for trouble. I was in there and I was in training, built like a brick shithouse. Twenty-inch arms, fifty-seven-inch chest. He came over to me and he was drunk as a skunk. And he said, ‘I could kick the shit outta you.’
‘Yeah, all right, mate.’
He wandered off, but was back soon enough. ‘I could kick the shit outta you.’
‘Yeah, yeah, you probably could.’
When he came back the third time I thought, Ugh, so I walked into the next bar. Five minutes later he was in there. ‘I could kick the shit outta you.’
I decided to leave.
I was walking through the toilets that connected the lounge to the front bar, when he grabbed my cut-off. As soon as he put his hands on my colours I thought, You’ve done the wrong thing now, pal.
I grabbed him by the hair and the belt, took him into one of the cubes, stuck his head in the toilet and flushed it. I could have kicked the shit out of him but it wouldn’t have proven anything because I could have beaten him with one finger.
To me, a good fight is one where you’re not sure if you’re going to be the winner. That’s when the adrenaline starts pumping. Sometimes you might take on three or four blokes. The bigger the odds, the bigger the rush. That’s the fight I like getting into. If I know I’m going to win, what’s the point? I’m just going to skin my knuckles.
And I like the fighting when it’s an all-in brawl. Anything can happen in an all-in. Or a knife fight, I love knife fights. Most people think if you’ve got a blade it’s just a matter of sticking someone, stabbing them. But it’s not. There’s a real art to using a knife and using it well, and I was lucky enough to have been taught that art. To feel your knife slicing someone or even feeling your own skin getting sliced – it’s something that’s hard to explain. I always felt like I was out of my body. I lapped up the pain. That’s when I zoned out. Everything went red and then black, and then it was over. And the other bloke was all carved up.
I WAS up at Kings Cross one time and this bloke had been following me round all night. Up and down the main street of the Cross, just like the bloke in the Illinois, telling me how he could belt the crap out of me.
‘Yeah, mate.’ I didn’t want to get into a blue in the main street of the Cross, but he was really starting to piss me off.
Finally I walked down Springfield Avenue and thought, All right, if you’re gunna keep following me you can cop it where no one’s gunna see.
I turned down the laneway alongside the Manzil Room, and once we were partway along I just turned and went whack. He staggered back. Whack. I hit him in the throat. He went down and was bouncing round on the ground like he was having a fit. I was watching him, and for some reason I thought, Fuck it. I pulled out the Aitor, a Spanish survival knife I used to carry on my right hip. I put my boot on his wrist, bent over the bloke’s hand, pressed down hard on the blade, and severed his thumb.
That was the first digit I ever took, but I threw it away on the way home. I thought, What am I gunna do with it? But later I was telling Shadow the story and he said, ‘If you’re gunna do that you oughta get a jar of formaldehyde so you can keep ’em.’ It sounded like a good idea so I picked up some formaldehyde from a funeral home and started carrying a boning knife in a sheath on the back of my belt. The Aitor wasn’t really up to the job of severing fingers.
Before too long I was down at the old Rock’n’Roll pub at Woolloomooloo (better known these days as the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel) and got into a punch-up with these two big Islanders. It turned out to be not a bad fight. One of them was stung on the ground, but then the other bloke got me from behind and stuck his finger in my eye, trying to gouge it out. I thought, Fuck you. I slipped my arm under his, got my hip under him and threw him onto the concrete. I had blood coming out of my eye and could hardly see. Righto, so out with the knife. Took his forefinger, then took his mate’s little finger. They were both still conscious. Took the digits home and they were the first to go into the jar.
It became a little thing of mine that when someone pissed me off I’d take a finger. If they pissed me off a real lot, I’d take a thumb.
BY 1971 the Gladiators were rolling along so we decided it was time to get ourselves a clubhouse. We found an old federation place in Queens Road, Five Dock, which was going pretty cheap because the previous tenants had wrecked the joint. There were some smashed windows and they’d knocked out a wall. It suited us because we would have knocked out the wall anyway to make the room bigger, and we had blokes in the club like Lurch, who was a bricklayer and carpenter, and Bull and Shadow, who’d done construction work. Between them they could virtually rebuild a house, so the mess didn’t bother us. Lurch and the blokes did it up. We kept two of the bedrooms for anyone who needed a place to stay, and converted the other two bedrooms into a bar and the shag room. Any bloke who turned up with his stray could use that room.
We kept the club pretty small. It was hard to find blokes that my brothers wanted in the club because they used to judge everyone solely on their fighting ability. I was more of the opinion that a bloke should be judged on how good he would be for the club, and what he could bring to the club. But Wheels, Bull, Shadow, Snake and Wack thought that if a bloke couldn’t fight, he should hit the highway. The problem was that to find blokes who could fight as good as my brothers was practically impossible. To this day, I think there’s probably been two that have been beaten once. One of them was dead drunk, and the other one had about five on him and got hit in the head with a steel rubbish bin.
Nevertheless, hanging round the Cross we managed to pick up a few nominees. One was a bloke by the name of Schultz who was a minder for the girls they had working above the Venus Room. If anyone started roughing up one of the girls he’d throw them down the stairs. He could fight, and he was a big boy. He was a power lifter. We’d see him at the gym bench pressing 600 pounds. I was round at his flat one day, and he had this industrial blender. He chucked in nearly half a tin of protein powder and some milk, and drank what must have been two or three litres of protein drink, then scoffed two chooks and a slab of tuna.
He bought himself a Rigid Sporty, which is like a chopper, and got himself acquainted with his new wheels. Each time the bike went down he’d grab it round the frame with one hand and just pick it up off the ground. We’d all be standing there in awe, just looking at him. He was a monster, with a chest like a barrel and no neck. When we went shopping to get him a vest to put his colours on, the biggest one they had wouldn’t go halfway round Schultz. They had to get a whole skin in to customise a vest for him.
I remember one night up at the Venus Room we got word that all the bouncers in the Cross were coming to get the Gladiators. The story went that a renowned underworld figure had hired them because Chop had beaten up his son over some sheila.
We sat there waiting for these bouncers. The Venus Room had a real narrow hallway that you had to walk down to get into the main bar, so we figured that if these bouncers came for us, we’d just stand at the end of the hallway and bash them two at a time as they reached us.
Well, we saw all these Maoris coming down, and at the time most of the bouncers up the Cross were Maoris. So we started bashing them. Bull had a chain, Shadow had a baseball bat, and we were pounding the shit out of them, bodies everywhere. Then all of a sudden Wack yelled out, ‘Hang on! Hang on! Have a look at their legs.’ Nearly every one of them was wearing shorts and socks. Turned out it was actually two grades of a rugby union team. They’d come over from New Zealand to play some district clubs out here, walked into the Venus Room for a night out, and had the shit pounded out of them.
We helped them up and called the ambulance then took off before the cops showed up.
ONE NIGHT in 1972 I was riding back through Haymarket in town when I came across a bunch of wogs belting this young boy of about ten and trying to drag his older sister into their car. I hopped off the bike and gave the four blokes a hiding.
The young sheila was terrified so I asked her where she lived.
‘About two blocks from here.’
‘I’ll ride me bike real slow and walk ya home.’
I had my feet on the ground, the bike more or less idling along. When we got there she said, ‘You come upstairs, meet my grandfather.’
I took my bike up in the freight elevator and rolled it out into this big room set up with heavy bags and large cane baskets. It turned out to be a kyite studio and her grandfather was the sensei. Kyite is a North Korean martial art not normally taught to Europeans, but the sensei was so grateful I’d helped his grandkids that he offered to teach me.
The art of kyite is to destroy your opponent. There’s none of this self-defence, search-for-enlightenment business like in The Karate Kid. Your defence is that you go in and beat the shit out of the other bloke, so that he can’t hurt you. The baskets in the studio were full of barley or wheat, and once you’d learnt the correct technique you could use your fist or, more commonly in kyite, your palm, to drive your arm through the grain right up to your elbow. Which meant you could hit pretty hard.
Kyite also finessed my knife skills, teaching the art of fighting in really close with a small curved blade, like a skinning knife, that can cut and rip at the same time. You’re trained to block out everything around you and just concentrate on the knife in front of you so that after a while it becomes automatic and you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.
I got up to a fifth-degree black belt, having added some nice new skills to my fighting repertoire. And I was about to get the chance to put some of those skills to use.
I’D HEARD up the Cross about an underground fighting scene run by my boss, the Little King. So I got in contact with him and asked if he could get me into it. I had to give him my word I’d never mention anything about him or the fighting to anyone, not even my brothers. Then it was just a matter of waiting for a phone call.
It might have been a month before the phone rang. ‘You got twenty-four hours, get ready. You’ll get a call at seven tomorrow night.’
Next night another call came through telling me where to go. The fights were held all over the place. They could be in a factory or an underground car park – anywhere you could get a large group of people together. The punters would get the same message: ‘Caesar’s fighting tomorrow night. You’ll get a phone call telling you where.’ There might be eighty or a hundred people in the crowd, sometimes double that – mostly suits and socialites with a smattering of knockabouts. Some of them were very high-profile people, the sort that would raise eyebrows if they were caught out mixing it with the underworld. We even had members of parliament come along.
The organisers would bring in fighters from around Australia and even overseas. Well-known boxers and martial artists. I’d be in trackies and bare feet. You can do a lot more with your feet if you haven’t got shoes on. You can stick your toes in your opponent’s eye.
There were no weapons, but that was as far as the rules went. It was bare-knuckled, anything goes. Something like the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Wrong Bet, or the reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter, only ten times more hard-core. You could take a bloke’s eye out, hit him in the nuts, jam his nasal bone up into his brain, whatever it took to win the fight. There was no ref to make sure no one died.
The purse was usually around ten to fifteen grand, put up by the Little King and two associates of his. I never knew their names but I knew they were well-known straight businessmen. They’d all be there at the fights and made big money betting on the side. A lot of the bigwigs in the crowd were splashing out some serious cash on their bets, too.
There were always about thirty seats for the heavies and big shots encircling the ring – which was a rope circle on the floor. Everyone else stood. Sometimes you’d see blokes with a bottle of Scotch, but there was no bar. This was just a matter of getting in, having the one to three fights on the card, and getting out.
When I first started I was happy just winning the fifteen-grand purse, but then I saw all this money changing hands on the side and I realised that punting was where the real money was being made. I went to the Little King and asked him if I could bring one of my brothers to make bets on the side like I’d seen the organisers doing.
‘All right, you can tell one brother,’ he said. ‘But you gotta make sure that brother knows that he’s not to tell anyone else in your family what’s going on.’
So I had a word with Shadow and he promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. He came to the next fight with me and used some of the money I’d won on the earlier fights to bet with. We started making some real money that way. In the early days, I got five to one, because nobody knew anything about me. But after I beat this well-known martial artist from Malaysia the odds shortened. Then I beat a very well-known American former champion. He might have beaten me in a boxing ring, but this wasn’t boxing.
I liked the underground fighting because every bloke you went in against would be a top bluer, otherwise he wouldn’t have been there. And there was no referee or doctor on standby. You never knew whether you were going to win. Even so, I always went in thinking I would. That’s something my old man drummed into me. He’d tell me, ‘Always know that you gotta be careful. But never go into a fight thinking that you’re going to lose, or thinking that the bloke might be better than ya. Always go in thinking that you’re gunna beat the bloke easy.’
So I used to go into the fights thinking, Well, you’ll be done in thirty seconds. And sometimes that’s all it took. Other times it took a bit longer to drop the bloke, maybe two minutes. If you wanted to kill him, that took thirty seconds less.
Once the fight was over, everyone would collect their bets and disappear.
ONE NIGHT me and Snake got a phone call from this sheila Sue. She went out with Mousey, the sergeant-at-arms from the Vikings, and was a really nice sheila, real staunch. She said, ‘Can you do us a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Can you drive me out to Cronulla? There’s a bloke out there who has some nine-carat gold cigarette lighters for sale and I wanna buy one for each member of the Vikings for Christmas.’
I thought that was pretty good of her, so I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll drive you out.’
When we turned up at her place, she had a girlfriend with her.
‘Who’s this?’ Snake asked.
‘This is Joanne, Little Billy’s old lady.’
‘Who’s Little Billy?’ Snake asked.
‘He’s a member of the Executioners.’
‘Yeah, all right.’ So we drove Sue and Joanne out to Cronulla.
When we returned, Joanne’s old man, Little Billy, was waiting. With a name like Little Billy, we’d expected him to be some gigantic bloke, but he actually turned out to be a little fella. He grabbed Joanne and started carrying on at us. ‘Whaddya doing takin’ me old lady out?’
Without missing a beat Snake’s just gone, whack. Knocked him flat on his back, teeth scattering. ‘Now you crawl over here and kiss my foot,’ Snake said.
Little Billy crawled over and kissed Snake’s foot. Snake turned to Joanne. ‘Well, we’ll be seein’ ya.’
‘All right. See ya.’
I rang Sue the following week, after Christmas, to see how the cigarette lighters had gone down.
‘Oh, not as well as I thought,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Mousey didn’t like it.’ I could hear in her voice that something was wrong.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’m coming over.’ I hopped on the bike and rode over to her place. There she was with this big black eye and a swollen lip that was just going down.
‘How come you got them?’ I asked.
‘Mousey got the shits that I let you and Snake drive me out to Cronulla.’
‘Didn’t you explain you were getting Christmas presents for all the blokes in his club?’
‘Yeah, but you know how he feels about you.’ He always thought there was something going on between me and Sue, which there wasn’t.
I waited for Mousey to get home from work and when he walked in the door I said, ‘Did you bash her because she went out to Cronulla with me?’
‘Oh no, Ceese, no, no. It was just an argument.’
‘Well this is just an argument.’ Whack. I kicked the shit out of him. I made him crawl over to Sue and said, ‘Unless she asks me to stop, I’m gunna keep kickin’ the shit outta you.’ He was begging her to get me to stop stomping on him. She looked down at him and a big smile came across her face. ‘All right, Mousey. Caesar, don’t hurt him any more.’
I leant over and grabbed him by the hair. ‘You ever lay a hand on her again and I’ll be back to finish you off. You’ll be going for a ride you won’t like.’ He knew exactly what I meant because I used to do other work – you know, taking people on holidays that they didn’t find their way back from.
***
SHADOW WAS driving a mate home through Summer Hill one night when his mate said, ‘Shadow, pull over. I wanna take a leak.’
So Shadow pulled over and the mate hopped out.
In fact, his mate didn’t need to take a leak, he’d actually seen this bloke walking down the street with a case of beer. He grabbed the beer, pushed the bloke over and jumped back in Shadow’s car.
Shadow drove off but the bloke got the licence plate number. When the cops turned up at Shadow’s place they charged him with assault and robbery. The coppers said to him, ‘We know there was another bloke with you. Give us his name and we’ll go easy on you.’
‘Get fucked. I dunno what you’re talking about.’
So he did some time in Goulburn and Emu Plains.
A few days before Shadow was due out, we got on the phone to Sue and tracked down her girlfriend Joanne who we’d driven to Cronulla. We went and picked her up, along with two other sheilas, little Anne and Julie, who had the biggest tits you’ve ever seen, and took them back to Mum’s. We wanted to give Shadow a warm welcome-home gift.
Mum said, ‘I know what youse boys are up to. One of these girls is for Shadow, isn’t she?’
‘They might all be for Shadow, Mum.’
We hid them in a bedroom awaiting Shadow’s return.
Shadow walked in the door and first thing he did was go up to Mum and give her a big cuddle and a kiss on each cheek. Then he sat down on the lounge with her to have a catch-up, his arm around Mum. Everyone in our family thinks the world of our mum. All us brothers would die for her. She’s a remarkable woman.
Mum and Shadow spent half an hour or so together, but Mum knew we had these three sheilas in the house, so we finally brought them out and said to Shadow, ‘Take your pick – or take all of ’em.’
He walked along the line, spotted Joanne and took her off into the bedroom. After that it was on. They were always together. She became his old lady and they went on to have a couple of kids together.
SHADOW MIGHT have had things sorted, but things were a lot more complicated for me where women were concerned.
I was sitting in my booth at the Illinois Hotel at Five Dock – the last booth on the left as you walked into the lounge. My back to the corner. Anywhere I went – the pub, someone else’s clubhouse, even my own clubhouse – I always sat with my back into the corner so no one could walk up behind me.
This sheila come up to me and said, ‘Nice bike out there.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Would you like to take me for a ride?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘If you take me for a ride we can go back to me flat and I’ll give you a fuck.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well you’re gunna regret this.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I know Caesar from the Gladiators. He’s a really good friend of mine, and I’m gunna get him to punch your head in.’
I was taken aback for a moment. ‘Really?’
‘Yep.’
‘Just how well do you know Caesar from the Gladiators?’ I asked her.
‘Real well. We used to go out together.’
‘Well if you know him that well, you should know who I am.’
She looked at me with a blank look and, in the pause, the old barmaid Gladys came trotting over. ‘Caesar, there’s a phone call for you.’
This sheila looked at me, went bright red, and whooshka, was out the door. Old Gladys chuckled, ‘I thought you mighta needed a hand.’
Bikers get a lot of women chasing them. When you pull up at a pub, you’ve got women. When the pub closes, you have sheilas lining up outside. The blokes get on their bikes, point to one of the sheilas, then point to the back of the bike. The sheila trots over and hops on.
Of course I was married, but there was nothing between me and Irene; I really only went home to see the kids. And as it turned out, Irene didn’t respect the marriage at all. Around this time I found out she’d been playing up on me with three different men.
I told Irene that as far as I was concerned the marriage was over, and that if I ever caught her cheating on me again I’d give her a real good hiding. For a while I took out this real stunner, Cheree, but I stayed with Irene. I figured that while the kids were young it was my place to be there for them, and I was.
Well Irene was one of these sheilas that just wouldn’t listen. She thought more of going out with these blokes than she did of her kids and me, and before long there was a fourth bloke.
I ended up in court when the bloke turned up in hospital and had to have his spleen removed. He reckoned I’d attacked him and the coppers had a couple of witnesses to say that I did. Fortunately the witnesses changed their minds, and then for some reason when the arresting officer took the stand he came up with a new angle: ‘On the same day of the alleged assault, the victim was up on the roof of his house cleaning gutters and fell off his roof.’
So they called the doctor back up and the judge quizzed him. ‘You’ve said that the only way this spleen could have been injured was by being kicked in the stomach. Would falling off a roof have caused the same damage?’
The doctor looked at me, then turned to the judge and said, ‘Yes, your honour, falling off a roof could definitely cause the spleen to rupture.’
The judge found the charge proven but recorded no conviction. It was the only time I’d ever been to court, and I kept my record clean.
Outside the court the copper came up to me and told me that one of his best mates in the force had the same thing happen to him; his missus had played up with a couple of blokes behind his back. He said, ‘I thought you deserved a fair shake.’ So there are some decent coppers out there. We shook hands and I returned to the unhappiness of the marital home.
AT THE beginning of May 1978, I was at the Croydon pub, nursing an orange juice and enjoying the spectacle of two good sorts playing pool. One of the sheilas lost the game with all seven balls still on the table, which according to house rules meant she had to flash her tits. So she got up on the table and took her top off. She had big tits, too. But it was the other sheila who’d really caught my eye. As soon as I saw the slender blonde bending over the table, everything stood up. I went as stiff as a board. I knew then that I’d be with her one day. If I hadn’t been married I’d have been straight over and asking her out. As it was I had to settle with buying her a drink and talking into the night. Her name was Donna and she was a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old nurse who worked at Camperdown Children’s Hospital.
About a week later Irene met Donna, and went out of her way to make sure they became girlfriends. She invited Donna to the movies, made sure she came over for tea. Donna started spending more and more time with our family, until one day Irene suggested that she move in with us.
I was a bit taken aback. ‘We don’t have the room,’ I said.
‘Well she can sleep in with us,’ Irene said.
So Donna moved in and night after night the three of us would crawl into bed together. Nothing happened, but it was becoming more and more obvious that Irene was trying to push me and Donna together. Irene would sleep on the edge of the bed and more or less turn her back and nudge me towards Donna. Not that she needed to push too hard. It was taking all the strength I had to resist. Maybe Irene was trying to ease her own conscience. Or maybe she thought if I was interested in Donna I wouldn’t be watching her so closely and she could play up as much as she liked.
For a long while Donna and I just talked, and we really clicked. I’d never had that with anyone else before. Neither had she. She’d been living with her mum and dad and had only been with three men before. Very quickly she became my best friend, and a few months later, my lover. Once that happened, there was no going back. I knew I’d found the one I wanted to spend the rest of me life with. I could trust Donna, I’d take a bullet for her in a heartbeat. She was loyal, loving, passionate and, above all, truthful. And of course, she was mind-blowingly sexy. But even if we could never have sex again, that wouldn’t have changed our relationship. I’d love her just as much. Simply having Donna sitting in the same room gave me pleasure and comfort.
Once it became clear how serious things were between us I said to Donna, ‘You wanna think this right through, because being the old lady and wife of an outlaw biker isn’t an easy thing, and especially with me. There’s a lot of people out there who, for some unknown reason, figure that the way to prove themselves or get a reputation is to either beat me up or take me out. There’ll be good times, but there’ll be a lotta hard times.’
And the woman said, ‘Well I wanna be with you, and the one thing I want is to be your wife.’
I promised Donna that one day we’d get hitched.
Of course Irene was still in the picture, and with the three of us living under one roof, it amazed some people that I had two ‘wives’. They didn’t know that my marriage to Irene was dead, and that if Donna hadn’t come along and I’d stayed with Irene I probably would’ve ended up killing her. Or at least waited until the kids got a bit older and then left with whichever kids wanted to come with me. Now that things had changed it was time for Donna and I to move out on our own. We got a little place together, and each afternoon I’d go and visit the kids when they got home from school. Then I’d be home by seven for tea with Donna.
A LOT of people think that bikers don’t look after their old ladies, but nothing could be further from the truth. I reckon we look after our old ladies better than the normal straight bloke does.
Soon after Donna and I got together, I heard that the sergeant-at-arms of the Phoenix had said a few things about her that he shouldn’t have. The Phoenix was drinking in at the Bat and Ball on Cleveland Street, Redfern, so I went in there one night with Donna and fronted the head blokes. It turned out the sergeant wasn’t there but me and the other blokes had words. One of them said to me, ‘You know we could stomp ya.’
‘Okay, go ahead and try.’ There were about twenty of them counting their hangers-on, and I had a cracked arm at the time, but I still outnumbered them. After about ten minutes every one of those blokes wearing a Phoenix patch had apologised to Donna. They even told me where their sergeant was. Turns out he was in Canterbury Hospital with a busted leg.
Next day, I headed over to Canterbury Hospital and found the ward this bloke was in. As soon as I walked in he started up: ‘I know what you’re here for, but I didn’t say it. It’s just people trying to get me in trouble.’
By the time I left, his leg would’ve been a lot sorer, and it wasn’t the only thing that was broken. He would have had a lot of trouble breathing through his nose, too.
No one speaks disrespectfully of my old lady.