Enforcer

by Caesar Campbell

  The rest of the talk among the members was, ‘Why did he do it?’

  Everyone had their own ideas, but Shadow and I pulled Snoddy aside for an officers’ meeting. I thought Snoddy deserved to know the real reason for all this animosity from Jock. We’d already asked the member concerned beforehand if it was all right to tell Snoddy and he’d agreed. So we got Snoddy to give his word that everything we were about to tell him must never be repeated. Snoddy had a Campbell ring so I knew I could trust him.

  I told him about Jock screwing _____ ’s old lady. Chop joined in: ‘Jock’s obviously split the club so that me and Shadow can’t bring him up on charges.’

  ‘That’s the reason for the two chapters,’ Shadow said.

  Jock had declared that each chapter would run its own race and have its own rules. That meant we couldn’t turn round now and vote him out of our chapter; he wasn’t in it any more.

  Snoddy shook his head. ‘That cunning old cunt done it so he wouldn’t lose his colours.’

  We never told anyone else the story of Jock rooting _____ ’s old lady. Even in years to come when our club got torn to pieces and picked over by investigators, when people used to say the split was over drugs or over Snoddy wanting to take over the club or me wanting to take it over, we never let on the real reason out of respect for the member who Jock had done the dirty on.

  ONCE THE dust settled and we were officially in residence in Birchgrove, the first thing I did was go and see the bloke in charge of our local police station up at Balmain. I asked him to bring up his station sergeant, because like in outlaw clubs, I’d found that it was the crown sergeants or the station sergeants who really ran the coppers in the area. I introduced myself and told them that we’d moved in, and what the go was: that if they didn’t harass us in the Balmain area they wouldn’t get any shit from us. There’d be no blues, no yahooing. ‘If you respect us, we’ll respect you.’

  They seemed to think that was fair and we shook hands.

  As it turned out we got on real well with the local coppers. We kept to our end of the deal: we’d ride out of Balmain in a pack but keep to the speed limit, only opening up the bikes once we were on Victoria Road and out of the Balmain area. The other thing was, they used to have a lot of assaults in Balmain, but as soon as we moved in they all stopped. Because if we went to a pub and there were a lot of yobbos there, we soon cleared them out. We ended up being unofficial bouncers for most of the pubs. So we were liked in Balmain. The suburb might be wall-to-wall yuppies now, but back then it still had a bit of a bohemian spirit. The cops even ended up coming down to the clubhouse of a Saturday night to buy a feed and have a beer. The old ladies would make them up a plate of sausages or chops and they’d pay their five bucks. It was the cheapest feed around. And funnily enough the licensing police never hassled us either.

  JOCK’S WEST chapter had left Granville and rented a big house on a corner just up from the Rosehill pub. But they had virtually no members to go with it. Just about everybody bar the Strike Force had stayed with us.

  So Jock was keen to get the Bandoleros on board. The Strike Force sergeant, Sheepskin, went and saw Bernie and told him that Jock wanted him to come over to the west chapter.

  ‘What chapter’s Caesar in?’ Bernie wanted to know. ‘I’m not doing nothing till I talk to him.’

  So Bernie rang me and I told him what had happened. He said he’d call a meeting of the Bandoleros that night and ring me straight after. When he called back he said he and all but three of the Bandoleros were coming over to the city chapter. So that was the end of the Bandoleros. Bernie and his crew were made prospects for us and the rest of them just went independent. I think they could smell trouble.

  The next month, September, Jock was due to marry his old lady, Vanessa. There were big plans for his bucks’ night, but not one member from the city chapter got invited. There was already friction anyway but that left a pretty bad taste in our mouths.

  Jock and his mates went up the Cross on his bucks’ night and one of his Strike Force, Sparra, got into an argument with some Samoan or Tongan women, calling one of them a slut. A bunch of big Islanders jumped them and the whole west chapter copped a real good hiding. Most of them ended up in hospital.

  It was embarrassing enough for us that Comos had been smashed – it weakened the colours even more – but then we found out that, in typical style, Jock was reworking the story to tell everyone that it was our chapter that got beat up.

  If it had really been my blokes, I’d have been evening up big time. But Jock had his own ideas about retaliation. He found out where these Islanders drank and had two of his members ride past and throw half a house brick through the pub window. Stuck to the brick was a note that read: This could be a bomb. And that was it. As far as Jock was concerned he’d retrieved his club’s honour.

  It certainly wasn’t over as far as the head bloke of the Islanders was concerned. He grabbed one of the hookers up the Cross who he knew hung round with us and told her to get a message to the Comancheros: he wanted to fight the head of the Comos. So this sheila came out to Birchgrove and passed the message on. She said the head Islander was a real big bloke, six foot five and seventeen stone, with tribal tatts on his chest and arms, and down his legs to his knees.

  Even though we were now two chapters, Jock still considered himself to be the head bloke – ‘El Supremo’ – so Snoddy rang Jock’s place to forward the message on. Vanessa answered.

  ‘Can you put Jock on?’ Snoddy asked. He could hear Jock in the background whispering, ‘Who is it?’ and Vanessa going, ‘It’s Snoddy.’ Jock went, ‘Tell him I’m not here.’

  So Snoddy told Vanessa instead: that this bloke wanted to fight the top Comanchero and it was to be in three days’ time, at two pm, in the alley behind the Rock’n’Roll pub at Woolloomooloo.

  Jock never rang back.

  The deadline passed and the hooker rang us again to say this Islander was really hassling her because no one had come in to fight him. Snoddy told Davo to tell the girl we’d be in the lane behind the Rock’n’Roll at two o’clock the next afternoon.

  Come next morning we were at the clubhouse still waiting for Jock to call. We waited till eleven o’clock, but heard nothing. Snoddy turned to me: ‘Well, big fella, looks like another job for you. Or should I ask one of your brothers?’

  ‘No I’ll do it.’ I reckoned that if you weren’t going to defend your patch, you shouldn’t be wearing it. Any one of my brothers or Davo or Kid could have done it, but being sergeant I figured it was my job.

  This Islander had a reputation for having a bunch of blokes hiding round the corner, and if he was getting beaten, fifteen or twenty Islanders would come piling out. So I had a car with four blokes tooled up for my back-up. We got there at two pm and they moved off to the end of the lane in the Holden. We waited till three o’clock, four o’clock. It looked like he was a no-show, but all of a sudden I saw all these black legs come running around the corner of the lane, and I thought, Fuck, there’s hundreds of ’em. I know I like the shot of adrenaline when there’s a chance I might cop a hiding, but this was ridiculous.

  Then I realised it was just a couple of Koori football teams out for a training run. Phew.

  I waited another half-hour before giving up on him. I started my Wide Glide Harley and rode down to where Snoddy and Shadow were parked.

  ‘Whaddya doing? Snoddy asked

  ‘I’ve waited long enough for this cunt. It doesn’t look like he really wants to have a blue. He was all piss and wind.’

  ‘I thought you woulda left an hour and a half ago,’ Snoddy said.

  ‘It’s not really your fight anyway, Ceese,’ Shadow said. ‘It’s Jock’s.’

  ‘When any cunt puts it on our club, it’s every member’s job to back up his colours for the honour of the club,’ I said.

  Snoddy suggested we take a drive through the Cross. ‘This bloke shouldn’t be too hard to spot. He’s supposed to be about five-foot wide.’


  We cruised through the Cross about four times but couldn’t spot anyone, so we parked and had a look in a few of the clubs and pubs. Still couldn’t find anyone answering the description, but we made sure people knew we were up there and that no one fucked with the Comancheros.

  JOCK HAD his wedding and none of us were invited. The following month, we had our national run up to Molong. Despite all the bad feeling, our chapter was still determined to go. We were all Comancheros, after all. Jock led his chapter over the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and out through Bathurst, where they were pulled over and hassled by the cops – like the cops always did with bikers that went through Bathurst.

  Our chapter decided to bypass Bathurst and went out through Oberon and up some back roads to a little place called Georges Plain. There’s a tiny little stone pub there with a bar about thirty feet long. The owners put on a really good spread for us. It was great. Then we rode on to Molong. We came into town, thirty-four bikes, riding two abreast. Jock saw us ride in and was spewing at the sight of this big pack coming down the road. He only had about a dozen blokes at that time.

  As we rocked up we could see there was some sort of ceremony taking place. I got off my bike and walked up to Sheepskin. ‘Whaddya doin?’

  ‘Jock’s making Roger a life member.’

  ‘How can he make him a life member? He’s only been in the club six years. You gotta be in the club for ten.’

  ‘Well that’s what Jock’s doing.’

  I went back and told Snoddy, who was a genuine life member. He went off the deep end at Jock. I could see that some of the Comos from the west chapter had gone and picked up guns so I went up to Snoddy and said, ‘Let it go, mate.’

  Then I turned to Sheepskin. ‘If youse make Roger a life member, you know you’re gunna fuck up everything in the club. If youse lot are gunna break the rules, the blokes in our chapter are gunna wanna break the rules.’

  Everyone was getting toey. The blokes from our chapter started coming over and it looked like there was going to be an all-in. But I was still sticking by my rule that I’d never fight anyone who wore the same colours as me. So I had a word with Sheepskin and told him I thought it best that the two chapters didn’t spend the weekend together. I calmed all our blokes down, got them on their bikes, and again rode out two-by-two, heading back to Georges Plain.

  As always, I was last to start my bike. I saw Jock standing on the side of the road and if his face had got any redder his head would have erupted. If it had been anyone but Jock, I could have almost felt sorry for him. If he’d just kept the Comancheros as a bike club and run it as a bike club, he would have had the biggest club in Australia. Probably the toughest club, too. Which was exactly what he dreamt of. But he stuffed it up with paramilitary fantasies – and with his dick.

  When we got back to Georges Plain, everyone set up tents by the creek in a paddock alongside the pub and settled in for the night. Some of the brothers went swimming, the rest hit the pub and a night of partying began. Next to the pub was a pile of these big old round wooden wheels that Telecom carried their cables on. There must have been 200 of them there. We asked the publican if we could use them for firewood. He agreed and so we had huge bonfires raging all night.

  Shadow had a six-man tent, and all the blokes that liked to bong on went in there and hit it hard. All you could see was smoke coming out of this tent. You’d get stoned just walking past. We were having a great time.

  Later that night we were surprised to see the lights of two Harleys approaching. They rode straight up to us and it turned out to be two of the west chapter, Bear and Bob, with their old ladies. They were the only two, other than the Strike Force, who’d gone with Jock when he split the club.

  Bear approached me and asked if he and Bob could come back to the city chapter. Bear’s old lady, Sharon, came over too. ‘Please, Caesar,’ she begged. ‘You don’t know how boring it is over with Jock.’ I called Snoddy over, told him what they wanted. He said all right, and with that, we partied on into the night. All the brothers and the old ladies had a great time.

  Around five am I heard gunfire. Jock wasn’t that stupid was he? I jumped out of my tent to find it was just Charlie trying to shoot a couple of ducks in the creek with his shotgun. He hit more water than duck. I took the gun off him and told him to go to bed or I’d throw him in the creek.

  Later that morning we started packing up to head back to Sydney. Sharon came over and thanked me for letting Bear come back. ‘Last night was just like old times,’ she said. ‘It was great.’

  Snoddy came over. ‘I wonder what Jock and his Strike Force are doing? How many hangers-on did you count there yesterday?’

  ‘Not counting Bear and Bob, four,’ I said.

  ‘Well that makes twelve of ’em. And how many’s over here partying? Thirty-six.’

  Light rain started to fall as we got on the bikes and rode out in our Driza-Bone oilskins, our colours over the top. The colours must never be obscured. By the time we got up to Oberon it was real foggy. Snoddy and I were out front, keeping the pace down, riding two abreast. The blokes behind would hardly have been able to see us. As we rode through the mountains the rain just kept coming. You really had to love the idea of being a biker out riding with your club. And we did.

  We made it back safely and everyone went to the clubhouse to thaw out. Which is better than Jock and his mob had done. We got a call to say they’d gone through Bathurst again, and again they’d been pulled over by the coppers. The cops defected four or five of their bikes, and then another bike caught on fire.

  We were sitting around the clubhouse talking about what a weird run it had been when one of the blokes pulled out a little bandsaw and started getting stuck into the bar. The bar was made out of old railway sleepers that Davo had polished up. We’d brought it over from the last clubhouse where we’d all burnt our names into it with a soldering iron. Now as I watched I realised this member was using the bandsaw to cut out Jock’s name.

  Oh jeez, I thought, this isn’t looking good.

  ABOUT A week later, my brothers Bull, Snake and Wack, plus Snake’s old lady, went to a west-chapter barbecue at the home of Tonka, who was in the Strike Force. As soon as my brothers walked in they got a bad vibe. Bull couldn’t understand it so he asked Sheepskin what the go was. Sheepskin said, ‘You and your brothers are always welcome as far as I’m concerned, but the rest of the chapter, especially Foghorn, don’t want nothing to do with the city chapter.’

  At our next meeting Snake and Bull told the club what had gone down and the attitude of the blokes out west. Coming on top of the bucks’ night and the Molong run, it was pretty clear that something had to give.

  In early November 1983, Snoddy, me and Shadow called a compulsory meeting. Everyone had to be there. No excuses. When everyone rocked up to the clubhouse, they could see Snoddy was in a sombre mood.

  ‘What’s wrong, Snoddy?’ Davo asked.

  ‘Yeah, what’s wrong?’ said Lard.

  ‘I got told on Sunday that Foghorn has been going out to Bikers Limited and handing over sets of colours for those little brass badges,’ Snoddy said. Bikers Limited was a bike club where a lot of bike enthusiasts used to hang out. You could join them by paying fifteen dollars for a little brass badge. Snoddy had heard that Foghorn was just saying to these blokes, ‘You give us your brass badge and we’ll give you a set of colours.’ The west chapter had suddenly built up from less than a dozen members to thirty.

  ‘Their chapter has become as big as ours in a matter of a month,’ Snoddy continued. ‘It’s like you ride with the west chapter and if you can make it from one set of traffic lights to the next, you get a set of colours. I can’t cop this. When I joined the club you had to do a minimum of nine months. Now it’s more like two. I don’t know how you lot feel, but I don’t want to be a Comanchero any more.’

  I got up and said that I agreed with Snoddy; there was no longer any honour in being a Comanchero. Jock was cheapening the colours by patching up e
very man and his dog, and the way the two chapters were going there was never going to be any brotherhood between us.

  Snoddy replied, ‘If I’ve got Caesar’s backing that’s all I need.’

  No one spoke against breaking away, but there were questions thrown about, like: ‘What are we gunna do if we’re not Comancheros?’ I got up and said, ‘Well, we’ll do what the majority of the club wants – burn the colours – and then we’ll have a meeting and decide what we’re gunna do from there.’

  The meeting lasted till about four the next morning. Snoddy put it up for a vote and it was nearly a hundred per cent.

  Snoddy was given the job of ringing Jock and telling him. We were all there at the clubhouse the next afternoon when he picked up the phone. It was a tough call to make but not as tough as some people have made out. There’s been a myth put around that Jock was some sort of father figure to Snoddy; that Jock had found him wandering around as a homeless young bloke and took him in. That’s even been talked about as the basis for a movie some people are trying to get up about the feud. But it was all just bullshit put out by Jock to make himself look more important.

  Snoddy had been a merchant seaman before he met Jock. That’s a pretty hard life. And he’d seen a lot of the world. He wasn’t some lost kid when they met. They were mates, yes, but they drifted apart over the years. There’d been tension between them for quite some time.

  I was listening in as the call went through. Snoddy aired some of our grievances: ‘We’re not gunna cop the west chapter giving colours away after five weeks, six weeks.’

  Jock tried all his usual tactics but it was too late.