More than two years after the airport brawl, Hawi was found guilty of murdering Anthony Zervas, while the 13 others were found not guilty. In the NSW Supreme Court, Zervas’ mother Frederica Bromwich called out, ‘No punishment is enough for the loss of my son’ as Hawi was sentenced to a minimum of 21 years behind bars. Judge Robert Hulme said Hawi and his Comanchero colleagues had displayed ‘a flagrant disregard’ not only for the law, but also for the many witnesses ‘in whose memories the incident will live long’. As a result of heightening violence, New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees announced that the state police’s anti-gang squad would be boosted from 50 members to 125.
While the bikie wars raged on, the Comancheros grew ever more powerful. Creating new chapters, the club has widened its membership to allow Middle Eastern and Islander members. From their Sydney base they expanded into South Australia and Victoria. The Spearmint Rhino strip club became a known Comanchero haunt in Melbourne, with the gang running three suburban clubhouses. At the helm of the South Australian expansion was former Hells Angel and founder of New Boys street gang Vince Focarelli, who has survived four attempts on his life. His 22-year-old son Giovanni was not so lucky.
The Hells Angels are undoubtedly the best known of all the bikie gangs. ‘Treat me good, I’ll treat you better; treat me bad, I’ll treat you worse,’ was the saying of Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels, which was established in March 1948 and has since spread worldwide, with 230 chapters in 27 countries and a membership of around 3,500.
Australia is home to 14 chapters with around 250 members, the first having been granted their charters in Sydney and Melbourne in 1975. Keeping the public in the dark about the murkier side of the cult’s activities, they expend a great deal of time and energy cultivating a positive image, raising money for charity and delivering Christmas toys to children. But many see this as a cloak behind which the gang practise a nonconformist and often violent lifestyle.
Violence has certainly bubbled to the surface in recent years, with friction between rival gangs exasperated by the Angels’ renewed push into the glittering Gold Coast of southern Queensland. The holiday area’s large transient population makes it an attractive destination for bikie gangs wanting to exploit lucrative criminal markets in drugs and prostitution. The NSW Hells Angels also control ‘legitimate’ businesses – including gyms, tattoo parlours and a haulage company – and attempts have been made to spread these enterprises north of the Queensland border.
In 2012 two senior Sydney members were reported to be spearheading the campaign, both having been granted ‘nomad’ status, which meant they no longer belonged to any one chapter but could operate freely in rivals’ territory. They chose the Gold Coast resort of Burleigh Heads as the base of the new chapter and settled in what was the heart of Bandido territory, within walking distance of the rivals’ clubhouse.
The local police force was immediately on the alert, saying the tentative peace that had existed in the city now looked decidedly shaky. They feared the move would fuel tensions with the other 300 Gold Coast gangs – in particular, Bandidos, but also outfits known as Finks, Uhlans and Lone Wolf Club – that had long fought to stop Hells Angels from encroaching on their turf. ‘This will not go down well,’ said a police source. ‘The Uhlans will probably do nothing but the Bandidos will have to react or be seen as weak.’
The front line switched to South Australia in November 2012 when fighting broke out between members of the Finks and Hells Angels at the ‘Knees of Fury’ Thai kick-boxing event in Adelaide. Worse was to come within a few days when a business owner in the city’s Pooraka district was killed in an execution-style murder. Jason De Ieso, 33, was gunned down in front of terrified witnesses in his spray-painting workshop, where he specialised in hot cars and motorcycles. Finks bikies arrived at the scene soon after the shooting, with one suggesting it was one of their number, or a close associate, who had been killed. The police, in a move aimed at keeping a simmering bikie war off the streets of Adelaide during the Christmas festivities, barred up to 80 known trouble-makers from every licensed venue in the state. The barring orders were to be for between three to six months and those caught breaching them could face a fine of up to $1,250.
In January 2013 a Hells Angel was killed and another man wounded in a shooting at the offices of a trucking company in Wetherill Park, Sydney. When police looked into the background of the victim, 45-year-old Zeljko Mitrovic, they found that, although he was a senior Hells Angel, he also had a network of friends in the Bandidos. He had been jailed in connection with a double murder in 1998. And he had been one of the confrontational Hells Angels members sent to Queensland’s Burleigh Heads to found a new chapter there. The convoluted saga of the bikie gangs’ feuding seemed to be summed up in the character of the victim of one single random slaying.
Another long-established Outlaw motorcycle club is the Coffin Cheaters but their approach is very different to the high-profile gangs such as the Hells Angels and Bandidos. Founded in Perth in 1970, the Cheaters’ chapters have spread from Western Australia to Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland – as well as Asia and even Norway. They have between 200 to 300 members. To join, applicants must be blood relatives of existing members, hence the patch ‘Blood in Blood Out’. For this reason, they have no ‘prospects’ (probationers). Neither do they claim any state territory, which is why their profile is lower than most of the major gangs.
Their mission statement runs: ‘We only claim the ground we are standing on at any given time. We look for no trouble, but our history dictates that we do not hesitate to settle any. We do not want to be featured on TV, Gangland, the History Channel or anywhere else. Leave us alone and we will leave you alone. We do not participate or condone the use of or sale of guns, drugs or any illegal activity of any kind. We have stayed off the radar for 40-plus years’.
Australian Coffin Cheaters are most often seen on long-distance runs. They claim that these extensive road trips, undertaken in relatively small groups, are the sole reason for their existence. They have sought to demonstrate to the public that, although fiercely independent, they are honest and principled. Yet they are known to be one of the gangs that have spread their network into Asia, one of their strongest overseas chapters being in Indonesia. They own businesses in Kuta and have been seen in groups wearing their colours in clubs and bars. Other bikie gangs with a presence in Bali include the Bandidos and Rock Machine.
Nick Anticich, WA assistant police commissioner and the force’s top bikie expert, confirmed the Cheaters had a local club in Bali and said gangs were ‘expanding aggressively overseas, opening clubhouses and absorbing smaller clubs in other countries’. He added: ‘Intelligence suggests local clubs are keen to build connections to some South-East Asian countries where amphetamines and the precursor chemicals needed to make them can be more easily obtained. There is also anecdotal information to suggest the interest in overseas countries may be to facilitate money laundering. The tough laws in Bali around drug dealing we believe provide a significant deterrent for members to engage in that activity – but we are not so confident that this deterrent exists in relation to the chemicals that can be used for drug manufacture.’
The Notorious gang reveal another dimension to bikie culture. It’s a recently formed Middle Eastern group that has begun competing with established Australian gangs in a turf war for drug sales. Notorious was established in 2007 in Sydney by Alan Sarkis and senior members of the Nomads motorcycle gang after the latter’s Parramatta branch was disbanded. They started to recruit youth of Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds, aligning themselves with street gangs to boost numbers and challenge rivals, in particular Bandidos, Comancheros and Hells Angels.
Although considered to be an outlaw bikie club, its members don’t all ride motorcycles. They are sometimes called ‘Nike bikies’, for wearing expensive trainers, fashionable T-shirts and being clean shaven, in contrast to the traditional bikie attire. The club emblem features a skull with a tur
ban brandishing twin pistols and the words ‘Original Gangster’ along with the motto ‘Only the dead see the end of war’.
Labelled as one of Australia’s most dangerous gangs, the Notorious grew to between 150 and 200 members, with the usual criminal activities of drug trafficking, arms dealing, extortion, prostitution, money laundering, murder, assault, kidnapping and drive-by shootings. However, leader Alan Sarkis has denied any involvement his club may have with organised crime and repudiates feuding with other gangs. He claimed the club had a very strict policy on drugs – even though Notorious members as young as 14 have been charged with possession and drugs supply. In an interview with a Sydney newspaper, Sarkis said: ‘Linking us to drugs or the drug trade is way out of line. We want to be acknowledged and respected as a motorcycle club, not as gangsters.’ This protestation apparently did not wash with NSW police, who arrested key members in 2012 in a bid to close it down.
While Notorious considered themselves ‘new blood’, the Rebels are ‘traditionalists’. Founded by Clint Jacks in 1969 with Brisbane as its heartland, the Rebels are by far the largest club in Australia, with around 2,000 members in 29 chapters. It also claims to be ‘the biggest all big twin Harley-Davidson club in the world’.
The structure of the Rebels hierarchy is revealing as to how these gang leaders and their minions think of themselves. To quote from a membership website, the Rebels ranks are as follows. ‘Head’ is the boss/leader. When he is around everyone has to listen to him and take orders, and of course he is the most respected and most powerful when it comes to deciding. ‘Second In Hand’ is the underboss/co-leader, the acting head while the leader is not around. He’s running everything in the gang and is in charge of recruitment. ‘Rebel’ is a made person, a high rank within the gang. This person must be respected by other members; he’s adviser for higher ranks and teacher for lower ranks. ‘Thug’ is a half-made person, a regular member, active and respected, involved in everything in the club. ‘Outlander’ is a person who is around sometimes, under watch by other members; more respected within the club. ‘Scum’ is the lowest rank. It’s the one who is outsider for the gang. He doesn’t have the respect of other members and leaders.
It is significant that followers are proud to be called thugs and others are happy to be known as scum. Perhaps this acceptance of their roles is something to do with their leader, a colourful character named Alessio Emmanuel ‘Alex’ Vella. Born in Malta in 1954, Vella, who was one of the original founding members of the gang, is an ex-boxer known to his followers as the ‘Maltese Falcon’.
Protesting that he was no more than an honest businessman importing motorcycles, police raided Vella’s Sydney suburban home in 1990 believing it to be a methamphetamine factory and found a $15,000 stash of marijuana, for possession of which he served a brief prison sentence. He has also been arrested, but not convicted, on other suspected crimes including stabbing two men and assaulting a woman. In 2008 he successfully sued the ANZ Bank for $2.7 million after accusing his former business partner, Tony Caradonna, of falsifying Vella’s signature to re-mortgage three properties, including the Rebels’ own clubhouse.
In 2009 Rebels members were the target of 49 coordinated dawn raids across Australia by 250 officers who swooped on homes in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia. They seized drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine, banned weapons, cash, child pornography, stolen vehicles and large amounts of stolen gold. Twenty-seven people were arrested, mainly on drug and weapons charges.
In 2011 New Zealand police announced that the Rebels were attempting to set up a chapter there, and that their introduction was not welcome. Some Australian Rebels members were deported. But not all the publicity surrounding the gang’s activities has been adverse. Unexpected scenes were recorded in Canberra in 2012 when 800 bikies descended on the capital for the Rebels’ National Run, the biggest in the club’s history, with members arriving from as far afield as Western Australia and Tasmania. The ‘shock’ news was that everyone was well behaved! As the club’s Canberra president, Wayne Clark, said: ‘We were very happy with the behaviour of everyone. And we were very happy with the police assistance – they were great.’
Whereas gangs like the Rebels are capable of displaying their more peaceable natures, the Gipsy Jokers glory in their notoriety. An Outlaw motorcycle club that was originally formed in San Francisco, California, on April Fool’s Day 1956, they are one of the most violent motorcycle gangs in both the US and in Australia, where they have 200 to 300 members. Gypsy Jokers MC Australia, established in 1969, has a high profile in state capitals Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane as well as provincial Mt Gambier, Wadonga and Kalgoorlie. The club’s colours feature a skull with the thirteenth tooth missing, which corresponds to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet: ‘M’ for marijuana. Their criminal activities include armed robbery, arson, drug trafficking, fraud, gun trafficking, homicide, identity theft and prostitution.
The Gypsy Jokers continued to hit the Australian headlines. Since the turn of the century, there have been charges of assault, unlawful possessions of large sums of cash, weapons and ammunition and attempted murder. In 2001 member Anthony ‘Rooster’ Perish and his brother Andrew (a Rebels follower) abducted a jailed drug dealer who was on a work release scheme. Believing the man, Terry Falconer, had previously murdered their grandparents, and also suspecting him of being a police informant, the Perish boys placed him in a sealed metal container, where he was asphyxiated. They then chopped up his body and disposed of it in the Hastings River, near Port Macquarie. It was 11 years before justice was meted out when, in April 2012, the brothers, along with a third man, were handed hefty jail sentences for the murder.
Another high-profile incident occurred in May 2009 when five members of the Jokers were involved in a drug-related shoot-out with another gang in Perth. Two were wounded and taken to hospital, one of whom was club president Leonard Kirby. But the most savage act of violence and vengeance by the Gypsy Jokers was the infamous 2001 car bomb murder in Western Australia of an ex-detective.
On 1 September 2001 Detective Don Hancock, formerly of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, and also known as ‘Silver Fox’, was returning from a day out at Perth’s Belmont racecourse when a massive bomb, planted under his car at the race meeting, was remotely detonated, killing him and his passenger, a bookmaker friend named Lou Lewis. The murder of the tough, popular detective, with 35 years service in the Perth force, caused a public outcry against the perpetrators, a faction of the Gipsy Jokers bike gang.
The case was not clear-cut, however. As investigations got underway, it became clear that Hancock, the son of a Kalgoorlie prospector, had tarnished his career by persistent allegations (since his death proven true) that he had doctored evidence in a notorious 1988 gold swindle case. It was at first thought that the murder was connected with these allegations but it became evident it was a clash he had with the Gypsy Jokers that got him killed.
After retiring as head of the Perth CIB, Hancock bought a pub in the hamlet of Ora Banda, about 50 kilometres from Kalgoorlie. In October 2000 several Gipsy Jokers entered the pub and badmouthed the barmaid, who was Hancock’s daughter, after which he threw them out. Later that night, one of the bikies, William Grierson, was shot dead as he sat around the group’s campfire. The Jokers believed Hancock was the killer. So, more significantly, did the police who came to investigate, though they had insufficient evidence to charge him.
Hancock remained free but the Jokers vowed vengeance. They repeatedly bombed his pub and home, concealing the explosives before one attack in the coffin of a teenage boy. Hancock returned to Perth, where he kitted out his home with a high-tech security system. But the Jokers discovered his visits to the racetrack and, supposedly with the details of the bookie’s car leaked by a Transport Department insider, they located it at Belmont and planted a package of ammonium nitrate under the passenger seat. It was remotely detonated by a mobile phone as Hancock drove away with his innocent fr
iend.
In September 2003 a known bikie chief, Graeme Slater, sergeant-at-arms of the Jokers’ Kalgoorlie chapter, was put on trial for Hancock’s murder. The principal witness, however, was a minor gang member who had turned informant in return for a reduced sentence on another charge. He was deemed unreliable and Slater walked free, although local police superintendent Dave Caporn said afterwards: ‘We considered that Slater was a dangerous criminal who committed violent crimes. We considered that he killed Don and Lou, but he’s been found not guilty and we have to live with that decision.’
With more operation strike forces across Australia to target outlaw bikie activities, the gangs have been squeezed in recent years. In May 2008 South Australia passed what Premier Mike Rann proclaimed as ‘the world’s toughest anti-bikie laws’. In a blueprint for other states, the Rann Act put restrictions on clan gatherings, created a new law of ‘criminal association’ to isolate gang chiefs, made it more difficult for gang members to get bail, and created new offences of violent disorder, riot and affray.
But the dubious glamour of the outlaws on two wheels still attracts followers. Criminologists put the increase in bikie warfare down to recruits from street gangs, the waves of new migrants and young newcomers, often recruited in prison. They usually arrive with existing grudges – against family rivals, other cults and cultures or, all too often, society at large.
CHAPTER 16
TATTOOED AND TERRIFYING: THE KIWI CRIME WAVE
New Zealand’s image is one of tranquility – a beautiful, peaceful, civilised country where citizens old and new have merged in an enviable semi-rural idyll. So it comes as a shock that the nation’s population of four million has the highest ratio of gang members in the world. A police estimate puts the number of major gangs at 40, with more than 70,000 members.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 16