‘The Angels insisted it would be okay but of course it wasn’t. The Slaves put him in hospital for six months and when he came out the Angels gave him a patch. I know of cases where the Angels have been beating the shit out of some biker, two or three of them on one, and at the end because the guy has put up a good fight, they’ve offered him a patch too.
‘Whenever there is trouble or something to be done, it’s usually the prospects who are first to get involved. Sometimes it’s because they are told to but more often it’s because they volunteer. They know if they do something good for the club, it means they are more likely to get their patch sooner.
‘When you go to something like the Bulldog Bash, you’ve got pretty much everyone in the biker fraternity all in one place, from the rich white-collar workers on their Harleys to despatch riders to the back-patch club members. It’s hard to believe there is any tension but, of course, there always is. There are tensions and there are political pressures. Outsiders don’t realise the ties and commitments members have to each other, it’s like family but more so. And what would you do if someone messed with members of your family?
‘The Bulldog Bash may be one of the most peaceful big events around, but that hides a lot of problems. So far as the Angels are concerned, there is always a war to be fought somewhere.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No one can remember quite how it began and few can recall exactly what it was all about but, by the early 1990s, the vicious fighting between the Wolverhampton chapter of the Hells Angels and the Birmingham club known as the Cycle Tramps had reached its bloody peak. There had been literally dozens of assaults, numerous stabbings, the odd shooting and a number of mass rumbles in which huge groups of both gangs would rush one another, armed with motorbike chains, baseball bats and meat cleavers. Many predicted the Cycle Tramps – the only remaining outlaw gang in Birmingham – would soon be extinct.
Biker battles were nothing new in the West Midlands. A few years earlier the Pagans and the Ratae had fought a bitter six-day war that started with a series of raids by Pagans on members of the Ratae deemed to be living on their territory. Two days later more than thirty members of the Ratae and reinforcements from Humberside and Norfolk drove in twelve vans to the Pagans’ headquarters in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and laid siege. After a brief stand-off the quiet street was engulfed in flames as both sides threw petrol bombs and the clubhouse began to burn. Shotgun blasts rang out and a team of Ratae ‘commandos’ made a frontal assault, firing a gun through the front door before storming the building. The first two to enter made it only as far as the hall before they were beaten back by knife- and sword-wielding Pagans. One was scalped Red Indian-style, while the other was stabbed in the neck. Both were dragged to safety by other Ratae and the rest of the gang hastily withdrew. By the time the police arrived they met an ail-too familiar response: no one had seen or heard anything.
Three days later the Pagans visited Brackley, Northamptonshire, and attacked the home of the then vice-president of the Ratae, who managed to keep his attackers at bay using repeated blasts of a .410 shotgun. One of the attackers fired back with a weapon of his own, but accidentally hit fellow Pagan Stephen ‘the Rabbi’ Brookes, killing him instantly. Nine Pagans were eventually convicted of manslaughter; eight Ratae were convicted of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.
But in early 1993 a delegation of bikers from the Cycle Tramps, visited first the Pagans, then the Ratae. Exactly what was said has never been made public but within the space of a few hours the rifts of the past seemed to have been forgotten. Representatives of all three clubs then travelled to Derby to visit another gang: the Road Tramps. At the time the Road Tramps ran the Rock and Blues Custom show held each summer and it was the largest event of its kind in the Midlands. The show has been going since 1983 and is well respected in the biker community as well as a solid money-spinner. The Road Tramps, like the Cycle Tramps, had been involved in a long-running dispute with the Wolverhampton Angels, who had expressed a considerable interest in taking over the Rock and Blues Custom show, with or without the Road Tramps’ blessing.
A few weeks before the opening of the July 1992 show, Derbyshire police received a tip-off that the Hells Angels would mount an attack at some point during the proceedings. The police promptly forbade the Road Tramps to allow any Angels on to the site and unwittingly cleared the way for the most crucial development of the biker war to proceed unhindered.
A few hours after the show had opened, members of the Road Tramps, Cycle Tramps Pagans, Ratae and several other gangs, including the Stafford Eagles and the Road Runners, appeared and slipped on new jackets. Emblazoned on the back were colours that no one had ever seen before. The logo was a skull with a kind of Indian headdress made up of different-coloured feathers. One was blue and white – the colours of the Pagans. Another was red and blue, the Road Tramps, and yet another red and yellow, the Cycle Tramps. There were seven feathers in all, each representing a different gang. The rivals had come together to form a brand new gang: the Midland Outlaws.
In August, a week after the show, there was a bungled attempt to nip the new alliance in the bud. A former member of the Cycle Tramps narrowly avoided death after answering a knock on his front door. As he walked down the hall, someone pushed the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun through the letterbox and fired. He survived and was later rehoused for his own safety.
Two weeks later at the Bulldog Bash, two Angels kidnapped a member of a neutral outlaw gang who was known to be friendly with members of the Midland Outlaws. He was tortured until he told everything he knew about their reasons for formation and their plans for the future. The Angels, it seemed, were running scared.
And with good reason. On an international scale, the second largest biker gang after the Hells Angels is known as the Outlaws. With upwards of forty chapters, mostly in America and Australia, they have a no-nonsense motto – ‘God forgives, Outlaws don’t’ – and wear colours that are a close copy of those worn by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, depicting a skull sitting above a pair of crossed pistons.
Although for the most part the two clubs leave one another alone, there has been bad blood between them since 1974 when three Angels were murdered by two Outlaws in Chicago. Periodic violence has flared up ever since. The Midland Outlaws, it seemed, were ‘prospecting’ to join the ranks of one of the Angels’ worst enemies. Throughout the biker world, the talk was not so much of whether the Midland Outlaws would launch an attack as of when it would be.
For a club to join en masse it must prove itself ‘worthy’ of wearing the colours. Exactly what this proof entails is not known, though past experience shows that a major attack or act of violence will often suffice. The Rowdies Motorcycle Club in Trondheim, for example, spent ten years hoping to be granted a charter to enable them to become the first Hells Angels in Norway. Then, one July, they launched a vicious knife and chain attack on a rival club, putting several of its members in hospital. Two weeks later the Rowdies received their Angels patches.
But then another gang came into the frame. The following summer Interpol tracked the movement of dozens of members of the third biggest of the international back-patch gangs – the Texas-based Bandidos – entering Britain and visiting members of the Midlands Outlaws. The Bandidos are one of the world’s fastest-growing outlaw clubs, whose battles with their rivals have been characterised by extreme acts of violence. Sometimes referred to as Bandido Nation, their colours depict a gun- and machete-toting Mexican cartoon character, and clearly state that they are an MG – motorcycle gang – rather than a club. Their motto is equally brash: ‘We’re the people our parents warned us about.’
For the Angels, the prospect of either club on British soil was bad enough (the Outlaws and Bandidos have a non-aggression pact and members of one often tattoo themselves with one other club’s colours as a mark of respect) but tensions with the Bandido Nation in particular were at an all-time high.
The latter had announced their i
ntention to open a chapter in Denmark, using former members of the Bullshit Motorcycle Club, which had broken up after their leader was gunned down by a Hells Angel in 1985. The Copenhagen chapter of the Bandidos opened in early 1993 and within six months the Bandidos had expanded into Sweden, Norway and Finland, and had numbers rivalling those of the Scandinavian Angels. Not only that, the Bandidos were becoming increasingly active in the local drugs scene, taking valuable sales away from Angels-sponsored dealers. Tensions between the two groups increased until the inevitable happened.
The fighting began in 1994 when a Hells Angel was shot dead in the southern Swedish port of Helsingborg during a fight that also saw a Danish Bandido wounded. In March a Finnish leader of the Bandidos, Jarkko Kokko, was shot dead in Helsinki. Days later Bandidos leaders were attacked at airports in Oslo and Copenhagen. In July a Danish Bandido was shot near Drammen in Norway.
A week or so later an anti-tank missile – one of a batch of twelve stolen from a Swedish army base – was fired at the empty clubhouse of a Finnish Hells Angels affiliate. The building was reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. Days later two similar rockets slammed into Angels clubhouses in Copenhagen and Jutland.
In October 1995 several Hells Angels were dining at the Stardust restaurant in Copenhagen when they were set upon by a group of Bandidos. Two Angels had to make a humiliating escape via the women’s toilet. The incident prompted the Angels to obtain missiles and explosives of their own and go about seeking revenge.
Within a few weeks they had fired an anti-tank grenade at a prison in Copenhagen housing a Bandido accused of an earlier missile attack against the Angels. The Bandido was wounded but survived.
In October 1996, during the annual ‘Viking Party’ of the Hells Angels in their heavily fortified headquarters in Titangade, central Copenhagen, the Bandidos fired an anti-tank missile from the sloping roof of a nearby building. It tore through the concrete wall and exploded in a ball of molten metal. Louis Nielsen, a thirty-eight-year-old prospect for the Angels, was killed, as was twenty-nine-year-old Janne Krohn, a local woman who was only at the party because the Angels wanted to improve their image by opening the event to neighbours.
Shockwaves from the attack were felt throughout Europe and beyond, and as a result a bill was rushed through the Danish Parliament giving police sweeping new powers. The ‘Biker Law’ was used to prohibit gang members gathering in residential areas, and allowed police to close down many of the bikers’ clubhouses. At the same time they introduced round-the-clock surveillance of the remaining biker strongholds, and kept a close watch on the key players in the conflict.
Yet, despite the clampdown, more violence followed.
In January 1997 a Hells Angel was shot dead in his car in Aalborg, Denmark, and six months later a car bomb exploded outside the Bandidos clubhouse in Drammen, Norway. A woman was killed as she drove past. The blast flattened the heavily fortified building, set nearby factories ablaze, and shattered windows three-quarters of a mile away.
That attack was followed by another three days later, in which one Bandido was killed and three wounded by a Hells Angels associate who opened fire at them outside a restaurant crowded with holidaymakers in the Danish resort town of Liseleje.
By this time both gangs were increasingly aware that the feuding could not be allowed to continue. The massive amount of self-imposed security, as well as the high cost of arms and explosives, had put a major financial strain on both groups. Soon, feelers were being put out in an effort to restore peace.
Officially, the last violent confrontation occurred on 7 June, 1997, when a Bandidos ‘trainee’ was shot dead by a Hells Angel in northern Zeeland. The toll stood at twelve dead and around seventy seriously injured. Shortly afterwards, live television coverage captured the emotive image of high-ranking Hells Angel Bent ‘Blondie’ Svane Jensen shaking hands with Bandidos leader Jim Tinndahn. The pair announced that, following a summer of negotiations, a truce was now in place. ‘We have agreed to co-operate to stop what has been happening,’ said Tinndahn.
The truth was that the two former enemies had drawn up an agreement in which every town and city had been systematically split up, right down to specific pubs, discotheques, and striptease clubs, in an effort to control their lucrative criminal activities. The ‘contract’ states that Hells Angels have ‘sovereignty’ over Denmark’s three biggest cities – Copenhagen, Århus, and Odense – while Bandidos have control of the rest of Denmark. Major holiday locations in Jutland, which have a flourishing drugs trade every summer, have been divided on a town by town basis, while Randers, Aalborg and Horsens have been declared ‘open’, giving both gangs the right to operate.
‘This deal not only gives the two groups a monopoly on crime in their respective territories, but also relative peace and quiet, and freedom from outside competition,’ says Troels Jørgensen, head of the National Investigation Centre, which keeps bikers under surveillance.
But Kim Jenson, a spokesperson for the Angels, denied the contract covered any criminal activity. ‘This agreement simply exists to prevent constant confrontation between our two gangs.’
Meanwhile, back in England, the Midland Outlaws (who had repeatedly and publicly declared their support for the Scandinavian Bandidos) and the Angels both focused on increasing their numbers and recruiting new members, seemingly gearing up for the inevitable clash.
In June 1997, just three months before the truce in Scandinavia had been announced, the Hells Angels heard that a small but notoriously violent London-based club called the Outcasts were attempting to absorb an equally small Hertfordshire club called the Lost Tribe. Concerned that such a move would make the Outcasts too great a force to be reckoned with, the Angels jumped in and made the Tribe honorary members. They made approaches to several Outcasts and invited them to become Angels. ‘It was more like a threat than an invitation,’ one Outcast said later. ‘The Angels had received orders direct from the United States which said that unless they maintained their position as the premier biker gang in the country they would lose their charter. They made it very clear that if we didn’t join them, they would destroy us.’ A couple of Outcasts took up the offer but the vast majority remained determined to stand up to the might of the Angels.
But the Outcasts didn’t see it that way. In November 1997 two members of the club were arrested in east London in possession of loaded shotguns, seemingly on their way to confront the Angels. There followed a series of minor clashes between the two gangs and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before things came to a head.
January 1998 saw the annual Rockers Reunion in Battersea. About 1700 people attended the concert, which has traditionally been regarded as an Outcasts event and had been trouble-free for fifteen years. But this time up to twenty Hells Angels were involved in a brutal attack on two Outcasts.
According to eyewitnesses, the Angels attacked ‘like sharks’, going in small groups, kicking and stabbing before retreating and another group taking over. Groups of four or five Angels, armed with knives, axes, baseball bats and clubs, swooped on their victims in wave after wave of attacks. Unarmed bikers equipped with headset microphones helped pick out the Outcasts from the crowd.
The first victim was thirty-three-year-old David Armstrong, a father of one, known as Flipper because he had lost his right leg while serving with the Royal Irish Regiment. He was dragged from his bike and hacked to death with axes and knives. He was stabbed four times in his abdomen and left leg. His lungs were pierced and he suffered severe internal bleeding. Armstrong’s friend, Malcolm St Clair, raced to his aid but soon became the next target. Italian photographer Ramak Fazel, who was passing by, watched in horror as a bearded biker laid into St Clair with an axe. ‘He was bringing his axe up over his head. The victim was lying with his head between his knees.’ Fazel then saw another man pull out a ten-inch knife and continue the attack. ‘The knife was thrust in on both sides. Then they calmly walked away. It was cold-blooded.’
Fazel th
en saw two of the attackers climb into a Volvo and made a note of the registration number on a napkin. The car was traced to Ronald Wait, vice-president of the Essex Angels – known as the Hatchet Crew. He was arrested after Mr Fazel picked him out at an identity parade.
Wait initially said he was drinking at a bikers’ clubhouse in Reading, Berkshire, at the time of the killings. The alibi was supported by several members of the club, but dismissed. Wait, who has had triple heart bypass surgery and suffers from angina and diabetes, then said he was too ill to have taken part in any attack. Despite this, he was taken to court to face trial.
During a brief spell in the witness box Wait, who gave his occupation as security guard, refused to talk about the incident, explaining the Angel code of silence thus: ‘The rules state that you are not allowed to make a statement to police, or speak to them if it involves another club member. You have to seek permission to speak to the police.’ Wait was initially charged with murder, but the prosecution decided not to proceed with the charge and he was eventually found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm and jailed for fifteen years.
The weeks that followed the deaths of Armstrong and St Clair saw more clashes between the two gangs. In March a fertiliser and petrol bomb was found at the clubhouse of the Angels’ Lea Valley chapter, in Luton, Bedfordshire. A Kent motorcycle shop owned by members of the Hells Angels was the target of an attempted arson attack. Then two Outcasts were shot close to the clubhouse of the Outcast Family chapter in east London. Both victims survived but refused to co-operate with the police.
In June 1998 Outcast Richard ‘Stitch’ Anderton was arrested after officers from the National Crime Squad found a massive haul of guns and ammunition in his home. They believed the weapons were intended to be used as part of an assault on several properties owned by members of the Hells Angels. Detectives stopped Anderten in his car and found a loaded Smith & Wesson .45 revolver tucked into the waistband of his trousers. A search of Anderton’s flat uncovered weapons, including an Uzi submachine-gun, an AK47 rifle and a rocket launcher.
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