CHAPTER 2
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 grou
nd, 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.
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