At the next meeting I said to Bull, ‘Mad Dog’s just never gunna make it. If youse want him to hang round to do the dirty work, watch the bikes and go for food and that sort of stuff, you’re really not doing him a service because he’s gunna think he’ll eventually get in, and he’s never gunna get in.’
My brothers might have been looking for fighters, but one thing I judged people on was that if you picked a fight, you had to back it up. If anyone hanging round the club was the sort of bloke who walked into a pub looking for a fight only because he had the back-up of the rest of the club, I’d get rid of him. Those blokes are nothing but trouble.
I WAS out for a ride when I saw these four blokes pull over an old fella driving an FB Holden. The four blokes were slapping him round the car so I pulled over and started smashing them. One of them got me a beauty in the kidneys with a baseball bat before I managed to drop them all. My back was aching as I turned to the old fella, ‘Are you all right?’
He said, ‘Bikie scum.’
Nice.
If I’d been wearing a suit the old fella would probably have thought I was the greatest bloke in the world. But because I had my cut-off on and the tatts, and my long hair and bandana, I was the bad guy.
I got back to the bike, and it took a young sheila of about eighteen to help me lift my leg over the bike. That’s how bad my back was. When I got home Donna had to come out and help me off the bike. I ended up in the hospital; I was pissing blood, the whole bit.
***
FOR FOUR or five weeks, everywhere I went people were telling me that the Hells Angels were looking for me. I was riding down Parramatta Road at Annandale with Donna when I saw some bikes with death heads on them parked outside the Empire Hotel. I’m not one to run from a fight so I pulled in and we went upstairs to the lounge.
There was this big bloke playing pool, his vest slung over a chair. On its back were the words Hells Angels Sydney. He put his vest on and introduced himself as Guitar. He knew who I was. We started talking and as usual it turned out only to be rumours of any trouble between our clubs. He brought over five of his brothers and we chatted for about twenty minutes before I left.
A couple of nights later I was sitting at the bar of the James Craig Tavern at Birkenhead Point when Guitar walked through the doors. Bull and Chop grabbed him and were about to punch him when Guitar called out to me. I told them to let him go.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.
‘Me old lady has just started work in the kitchen,’ he said.
I got Shadow to hop the bar and go out to the kitchen. Sure enough, Guitar’s old lady Joan was working there, so I said, ‘That’s fair enough, you can come here anytime you want. D’ya want a drink?’
‘Yeah, I’ll have a Jim Beam,’ he said. ‘Whadda you want?’
‘I’ll have a lemon squash,’ I said.
‘A lemon squash?’
‘Yeah,’ Shadow piped up. ‘Ceese don’t drink.’
So I bought Guitar a Jim Beam and he bought me a lemon squash, and from then on we formed a pretty tight friendship. He started coming to the tavern most nights and we’d go for rides of a weekend. You could see me and Guitar up the Cross together at least twice a week, a Gladiator and a Hells Angel sitting side by side on our bikes, yakking on. He knew just about every sheila in the Cross. They’d be coming past: ‘How ya goin’, Guitar? How ya goin’ Caesar?’
Other blokes would be up there sitting on their Harleys too. Mostly independents who weren’t in a club, like Rat and Shotgun Frank. They’d park alongside each other of a Friday and Saturday night and just sit there. Sooner or later a sheila would walk up and ask to go for a ride with one of them. The bloke would take her round the block, then off to a nearby flat they had for a screw. Afterwards he’d drop her back and continue sitting. That was their life. They didn’t have to go hunting the women, the women would come up to them.
We were up there one night when Guitar decided to go for a ride up the main drag. He’d been gone fifteen minutes and I was starting to think something might have happened to him. I was just about to kick over the bike and go looking for him but next minute here he was, tearing down the main street of the Cross, and he’d picked up the Dargie Sisters, a singing duo who’d just come off stage at the Manzil Room. They had on the tight leopard-skin catsuits, big boots, big hair, one of them sitting on Guitar’s tank and the other one behind him. Guitar was yahooing all the way along the main drag. Did a big U-ey down at Bayswater Road, then back again, four times before finally pulling in to where I was. ‘I’m having a good time tonight,’ he crowed.
The Hells Angels were the average size of a club at that time, about fifteen strong. They got much bigger later on, but most of the clubs in the seventies were only around twelve to twenty members. It wasn’t until the late eighties and early nineties that club chapters started to sprout up everywhere. I reckon twelve to fifteen blokes is a good size for a chapter. You get to be really tight. Me and Guitar used to talk about it a fair bit. He told me about a brawl in the United States between his American brothers and a club called the Breed. More than ninety members of the Breed took on the Angels at a Cleveland motorcycle show. There were only twenty-four Angels, but the Angels kicked the shit out of them. Four dead to one. Which went to show it wasn’t all about numbers. It went on the quality of the club.
I WAS out with the Gladiators one night when we picked up a sheila and took her back to Lurch’s flat. All the blokes except me went through her. Then Lurch went and fell in love with her.
I said to him, ‘She’s only a slut. You’re mad.’
Two days later we went round to Lurch’s and he was gone. He’d packed up with this sheila and taken off. And worse, he’d taken his colours with him. So me and Bull tracked him down to a flat in Enmore. Knocked on the door.
‘Yeah?’ It was Lurch. Bull kicked in the door. Lurch was standing there and Bull’s gone, bang, sent him flying across the bed. As he was getting up it was my turn. Bang, and he went down again. Lurch could really fight, too, but he was lying on the floor cowering behind his hands: ‘I don’t want no more.’
I turned round to Bull at the next meeting and said, ‘See what happened with Lurch? He’s a really good bluer, he was someone that youse accepted as a member in the club, but when he got a bit of a thumping, he chucked it in.’
With our numbers dwindling I could see the club just wasn’t going anywhere. Hanging around the Com-ancheros and the Angels I saw clubs that were growing and moving forward. As tight as we were, and as fearsome a reputation as my brothers had, the Gladiators just didn’t have a strong image as a thriving club. I sat back night after night and thought, How can I change the club? To change the club meant I had to change my brothers’ minds, but they were dead set in their idea that all members had to be able to fight.
To a point I agreed with them. I liked a small, tight club. I knew it was about quality and not quantity. But I also realised that for a club to keep going, you had to bring in new blood, and younger blood. You had to have all different sorts of people in your club.
At the next meeting I had one last shot at convincing them. But it was no good. They came up with the same old arguments. They weren’t willing to change. In fact, they wanted to take it a step further and introduce an initiation test: if a bloke wanted to join the club he had to hang round for a bit, and then he had to pick one of the brothers to fight. If he beat the brother, or even held his own, he could become a nominee.
I could see this was just never going to work. I thought, Blokes aren’t gunna want to come to a club where the first thing they’re asked to do is get into a blue with a member, especially when it’s blokes like my brothers.
At the end of the meeting I turned around and said, ‘Well, I’m handing in me colours. Youse can run the club the way youse want.’
A COUPLE of weeks later John Boy approached me. He’d heard that I’d quit the Gladiators and said Jock had sent him to come and see if I’d become a nom for
the Comancheros.
‘Will you do it for me? Remember, you gave me your word,’ he said.
Since going to the pub and their club party I’d got to know a few of the Comos and some of them weren’t bad blokes. Snoddy and John Boy and a few of the others seemed really staunch. But, more importantly, I’d given my word. I don’t give it very often, but when I do I keep it.
So I said, ‘Yeah, all right, I’ll join youse.’
Not long afterwards I ran into Guitar and he said, ‘I heard you left the Gladiators.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Any chance you coming over to the Angels?’
‘I would’ve loved to but you’re a few weeks too late.’
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘I’m a nom for the Comancheros.’
‘Ah, fuck! I was outta town, I only just heard that you’d left the Gladiators.’
‘Well if you’d come and asked me before John Boy I’d have went with ya.’
But it was too late. I owed John Boy and I’d given him my word. I packed away my Gladiators vest and got a new one with the word Nominee written on it. And I became a Como.
CHAPTER 4
Jock Ross had started the Comancheros in 1966, naming the club after a John Wayne film of the same name. In the film, the Comancheros were a gang of white renegade whiskey- and gun-runners with a secret Mexican hideout. By the time I joined up in August 1978, Jock Ross’s Comancheros were an outlaw motorcycle club of thirteen blokes who owned Parramatta, the heart of Sydney’s west. With no clubhouse, the members based themselves at the Ermington Hotel, on the corner of Victoria and Silver-water roads.
I’d gone from being the president of my own club to a lowly nominee. Being a nominee meant you were there to watch, and to do what you were told. You weren’t included in meetings, your opinion wasn’t taken into account, and you were always on call so that if there was a shitty job that needed doing, you were available to do it. I watched the other noms being sent on bike watch, building fences, mowing lawns for members – but the funny thing was that I wasn’t asked to do any of that. I was being treated more like a member. Maybe they were just respecting my previous role with the Gladiators, but I had a sense that there was more to it than that.
ME AND Donna moved into a house on the corner of Frederick Street and Liverpool Road, Ashfield, coincidentally the same house where I’d gone to my first Comanchero party. And late in 1978 I decided it was time to marry her. I was still technically married to Irene, but that didn’t stop us from having a club wedding.
We got a bloke from a Christian club in North Parramatta who was a registered cleric, and I told him the story.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know it’s not going to be a hundred per cent legal.’
‘I realise that, but I want the ceremony. I want to make her my wife.’
‘All right, I’ll do it for you.’
So we had a wedding ceremony at a Comanche-ros’ house, wearing our bike gear, and Donna legally changed her name to Campbell. As far as the club was concerned, that made her my wife. And Donna was the perfect club wife. She understood that the club was for the men and that the old ladies were only guests. She knew that you kept your mouth shut and you didn’t ask questions. And she knew the meaning of loyalty. She made friends and earned a lot of respect in the club. At Christmas, if there were any blokes at a loose end, she’d invite them round for dinner with us. It was a tight club where everyone looked out for each other, and she fitted right in.
MOST COMANCHERO nominees had to serve a nine-month minimum to get their colours, but I was patched after six and a half months. The next day, Jock phoned me up and asked me to come round to his place at Pennant Hills.
I put on my brand-new set of black and gold colours with the image of the condor and a broken wagon wheel, and rode out to the Hills district. Jock’s old lady Vanessa brought me a glass of Coke. Aside from running the club, Jock owned a truck and a fencing business, which must have been doing well, judging from the size of his house.
Me and Jock were sitting down talking about the club for a while before he got to his point.
‘Is there any chance,’ he asked, ‘of getting your brothers into the club?’ Suddenly, I could see why I’d been given an easy ride. Jock wanted the fighting power of the Campbells.
‘You might get a couple of ’em,’ I said. My brothers had recently closed down the Gladiators and were riding together as independents.
‘I don’t want a couple,’ he said. ‘I want all your brothers. I want to have all the Campbells in the Comancheros.’
I went and spoke to Bull, Shadow, Wack, Chop, Snake and Wheels. ‘Jock told me he wants you all in the club. He said youse’ll have a sweet run through.’ Meaning that, like me, their nominee time would be short and easy.
Shadow was the first to agree, then Bull. Once they’d come over, Wack and Chop followed. Snake was a bit harder to convince. He didn’t want to be a nominee. So I had a word with Jock and Jock said, ‘You tell Snake that all he’s gotta do is turn up on club nights and meeting nights. The rest of the time is his.’ It wasn’t, strictly speaking, within the rules. Pushing a nominee through like that would have got up the noses of other members. But Jock was president and he seemed to do whatever he wanted.
I passed Jock’s offer on to Snake and it suited him. He agreed to come over to the Comancheros. The only brother who wouldn’t come was Wheels. He just didn’t like Jock.
The night the rest of my brothers were patched, Jock had the biggest grin on his face. He’d got what he wanted. Jock knew that having my five brothers in the club was like getting fifty more blokes. They were staunch, and they would do anything to win a fight. The power and reputation of the Campbell brothers suddenly added a whole lot of weight to the Comancheros.
JOCK ROSS was a military man. Even before I joined the Comancheros I’d heard stories of his obsession with war, how he ran the club like an army. His favourite topics of conversation were his time with the SAS and the strategies of leaders like Napoleon and Genghis Khan. The way he’d recruited my brothers was in line with all that. He was building up his own army, and he wanted warriors. As a Scotsman he was well aware of the Campbells’ fame as highland warriors.
Jock’s military focus was evident in the club rules. There were fourteen rules in the Comanchero charter, which was pretty standard, but within those rules were a whopping fifty or sixty by-laws. All of them written by Jock. And some of them were pretty strange. Like the ban on associating with members of other clubs. Jock’s reason for that was that if there was ever a war with a club that you had friends in, you might not be able to bash them or, if he gave the order, kill them. I had plenty of friends in different clubs so that was one rule I didn’t plan on keeping.
The other peculiar thing about Jock was that he wasn’t much into his bike. In fact, he had night blindness, so me and another member had to ride either side of him and tell him when to turn, or when to brake. Hence when I first joined the Comancheros there wasn’t a lot of riding going on. Jock’s idea of going out was to go to the same hotel and do the same thing every week. It was always Saturday night at the Ermington Hotel, playing pool. There’d be no runs to different parts of Sydney like we used to do in the Gladiators. I suggested we go to different pubs where they had bands on, and we started riding into places like Newtown and Glebe, up the Cross, into Darlinghurst and Taylor Square. We also started going for runs out to Blacktown and up to Windsor. It was a motorcycle club, after all, and that’s what most of the blokes were there for. They enjoyed the ride.
Not everyone, though. Jock’s inner circle were more like him, particularly his two lieutenants, Foghorn and Snowy. Both were life members and always seemed to be in Jock’s ear.
Snowy was about five eleven, with thin hair and a thin build. He wasn’t a bad bike mechanic but I rarely saw him actually riding. Under Jock’s rules, if you were a life member you could do as you liked, so if he didn’t want to turn up on his bike, he didn’t have to. Inst
ead, he’d go everywhere in his ute. This made the Comancheros completely different from any other club, where the bikes were the reason for being.
Then there was Foghorn, a little bloke with big-man syndrome. He was scrawny – couldn’t have been more than five eight and sixty kilos if he was lucky – with straggly hair and a little goatee. He walked with a limp and didn’t ride his bike much either.
Snowy and Foghorn didn’t like it when my brothers and I came into the club. Not only had our arrival made the club a lot stronger, it had also started attracting more people to the Comancheros. The club was growing and you could see Snowy and Foghorn being pushed aside. Before, they’d been the big fish in a small pond, but they were quickly becoming tiddlers in a big pond. They wanted the power and the attention back with them.
ASIDE FROM the petty power squabbles and Jock’s military caper, though, the Comancheros were a tight club. There were some tough blokes and, along with my brothers, a couple of good fighters. There was plenty of riding, partying and blueing to be had.
It was the end of the seventies and we were at a concert down at Parramatta Park when a fight broke out among three other outlaw clubs. There was brawling all over the place, and when one of our members, Lard, decided to get stuck into a bloke, things spilt over into our club. Next thing I saw, Jock was getting thumped. It was the first time I’d seen Jock in a fight, and he was losing badly. I went over and smashed his opponent. He went down and then someone else was calling for me. ‘Caesar! Caesar!’ It was Roach. Three blokes had him down on the ground and were punching the shit out of him. Roach couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but he was staunch. He was always right in there, bleeding but giving it a red-hot go. I grabbed a chain with a big padlock on it from the front of someone’s bike and walked up behind these blokes. Whack. Whack. Whack.
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