by Iain Parke
A lot of the guys didn’t get what was going on and why Dazza was doing this. Why go to so much trouble to bring in new members through the merger, only to then devastate the club he had taken over. And why push someone unpopular like Butcher to the top of the pile?
But to me it made perfect sense.
All the way back to the early days of The Reivers and then on through The Legion, we as a club had always been used to being free to run our own affairs, but life within The Brethren was going to be very different, at least to start with, and that could easily lead to serious problems.
So Dazza had to decide how he was going to hold onto the territory he’d just acquired for The Brethren.
The best thing he could do would probably be to get involved personally, to base himself at the clubhouse where he could be at the centre of what was going on, to be very visibly in charge. The problem was that this wasn’t practical for him for a variety of reasons, not least that he needed to stay visible back in town.
So he had a choice, he could leave the club as it was, operating under Tiny as its local leader. But Dazza just couldn’t take the risk. It wouldn’t be taking control; it would leave the club and its ethos intact, under its old leader and so still a separate unit with the threat that it could, as a unit, go against him at some point in the future. You could see it happening; if there was ever a challenge coming out of the ex-Legion members in our area, it would be the spirit of independence and freedom that drove us.
So Tiny had always known his position would be the first casualty if the merger went ahead.
But it wasn’t just Tiny as the figure-head. Dazza had to go further, to weaken the club, breaking it up to reduce its numbers, ruthlessly driving out any member who could be an opponent or didn’t make the grade in terms of loyalty and attitude. After all, the surest way to ensure control over the patch would be to wipe out all the potential competition for it. But he knew that Tiny would never drive this through for him.
So his only option was to impose a new leadership who would weed out anyone whose face didn’t fit or who was thought to be too soft for the new regime. But it had to be someone who was loyal to Dazza, who knew that their power only came from Dazza’s support and who would fall without it. Someone then who would be ruthless and active in promoting Dazza’s interests in everything they did for their own power and protection.
Butcher fitted the bill perfectly. Unpopular and a ruthless bastard. He would be ideal.
Funnily enough, Butcher’s crew would be a very different story if it ever came to it. There was a charter run by a single dominating individual. If you took him out it would be easy to replace him with someone else that you imposed and expect the rest to follow as they were likely to find it difficult to chose one of themselves to take charge.
But even leaving aside the how he was going about it, I still didn’t get the why, and that troubled me more.
I was still wondering what Dazza was up to and why The Brethren had gone to all the trouble to acquire The Legion? There was still no sign of war with The Rebels, no sign as yet of the expected Rebel takeover of The Hangmen that Dazza had used as the reason for pushing the patch over. So I still wondered whether this had just been an excuse to get The Legion in, and whether Dazza had some private motives of his own.
The question still bugged me. Why would Dazza feel he needed The Legion and our territory? Why had he been so particular about needing Westmorland? We had some small towns and an awful lot of empty moorland, holes or no holes, nothing surely to get excited about?
But as it happened I wasn’t the only one who seemed concerned about how things were shaping up, although for different reasons.
After only a month or so in his new colours Billy was complaining, loudly. Surprise, surprise, things weren’t working out the way he had expected and he was moaning to me about it.
‘What’s the point of taking us over if he doesn’t want to exploit the territory? You know I thought that when we patched over it would be the big time man, that we would really start to roll, I thought it would be my chance to really start to earn but no, now I’m stuck with this shit.’
That was one of the problems that Dazza would be having now across the piece I guessed as I let the whining wash over me. It was as old as the hills really. He had used people like Billy as his route in to taking over The Legion and now they would be expecting it to be payback time. But the problem was he could never satisfy them, he would never be able to give them as good a deal as they would be looking for in return for the help that they had given him, so inevitably they would start to resent him. Funnily enough I thought that he had a better chance of winning over the guys who had been anti but that he hadn’t needed to hurt. After all, they had gone into this with no expectations of him, no assumptions that there would be favours done for them, so all he had to do really was to leave them alone, to treat them OK and in time they would become reconciled to him.
Whereas Billy as a supporter was complaining about how difficult he was finding it to make his nut now and becoming resentful.
The message had come down from Dazza clearly enough. One of the reasons he had pushed for the takeover was that he wanted the space our territory could provide. Space in the open countryside so that he could organise things that were difficult to do in town. The long and the short of it was that we weren’t great territory for selling gear. Billy’s and the other guys’ operations had always been relatively small time deals and a change of patch wasn’t going to change that. It was just the law of supply and demand and out here in the sticks with small towns and villages the demand for Billy’s gear was never going to grow that much, whatever colours he was wearing.
No, what Dazza wanted space for was production. Not sales.
So he set up the first skunk house we’d ever come across. I was impressed.
It was an old farm house and barn high up in the valley. It was off grid, with an old lorry engine to drive a generator, liveable but a bit tumbledown and he was able to pick it up for a song with me arranging the mortgage for him. He staffed it with a bunch of Vietnamese guys who came up from down south somewhere who immediately got to work ripping out everything they didn’t need. A couple of The Brethren took it in shifts living up there for a week at a time with a slick back tagalong to front for them, get the shopping in and stuff. He put out the story locally that the Vietnamese were builders brought in to do renovations working for the owners. They even used a battered white Transit van with a building firm logo on the side.
They insulated the house like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve never seen so much Rockwool go up in a loft as these guys used. They sealed up the windows and the doors until the place was tight as a drum. Then they rigged all of the rooms out with heaters, high intensity lights and hydroponic growing gear and installed an extra pair of 2,000 litre oil tanks out at the back to feed a massive new genny. This place was going to take a lot of power, they always did and it was one of the things that sometimes gave them away in town. But out here we made our own power. All we needed was an oil delivery company that would keep the red diesel flowing without asking too many questions, and so he also arranged to buy into Pogle’s oil delivery business which meant a steady flow and a nice fat margin for Pogle of course.
And how did I know? Well it was because I was handling the money side for him. Buying up the properties, organising the companies.
From what he was asking me to do about placing orders in Oz I guessed he was in the process of setting up a Meth factory as well. I really doubted that he wanted to get into the canned peach importation business just for his health. My guess from what I knew about the Meth scene in Oz was that that was how he was planning to bring in the precursor chemicals. That, after all was one of the advantages of being part of an international organisation like The Brethren, those overseas contacts you could make at the annual world run, or the deals you could tie up through trusted intermediaries. And it would make sense to stick a factory out here in
the countryside ’cos making that stuff stank to high heaven.
So with so much at stake on getting the production side up and running, Dazza wanted things kept quiet. He wanted to protect his new investments, to get them earning, so the last thing he wanted was any local trouble that might blow up in his face. In fact he could afford to lose sales locally by letting things wind down because he would make much more from wholesaling the product elsewhere. And that was hurting Billy and some of the others as they relied on local sales for their living.
‘Well it’s OK for Dazza, but how the fuck am I supposed to earn?’
So was that it? Just a need to control the guys and control the territory to have his factories? No I still just didn’t buy it. He could have subbed a lot of that work out to the guys even if they were still Legion patched. In fact it might even have suited him better to do it that way as it would have provided him with more of a cut-out, a deniability if it all ever went tits up.
‘Why don’t you ask him?
‘Are you fucking kidding me?
‘OK, I’ll ask him.’
*
My chance came the following week.
Dazza had bought me a bike as a getting out of hospital present to replace the one I’d lost to Gut and his spanners and he organised a party to present it to me.
Like most of us I had a few bikes on the go at any time. For club runs and full dress business I had my Harley of course. It wasn’t exactly in the club rules that you had to have one but it was pretty much expected. There comes a time in a man’s life, for me it was aged about twenty-five, when a man needs a Harley, a man’s bike.
Mine was a customised fat bob.
To me a bike has to be rideable. Choppers didn’t get much coverage in Bike or Superbike as I was growing up and when they did they tended towards the baroque, all twisted steel springer forks and diamond coffin shaped tanks. For custom gear I had to buy copies of the American mag Easyriders as and when I could find them, and then BSH when it started. And over time my ideas about customising matured. Bikes are functional objects and for me their purest beauty lies in stripping them down to their purest practical elements. So that’s what I think chopping should be about. I appreciate the artistry and work that goes into some of the more extreme choppers, but to me anything with over-lavish or intricate artwork or ornamentation misses the point, as does anything that takes the design elements to such extremes that they have compromised the purpose of the bike.
But it’s a personal choice. A man has to build the type of bike he wants, it’s the greatest expression of who you are, your personal design sense, your aesthetic. And some of the more extreme bikes are awesome works of mechanical sculpture, there’s no doubt about it. Some are works of artistic genius, some can take your breath away or make you think about bike design in a whole new way. But sticking on a hardtail, a tombstone tail light, sissy bar and a pair of six inch over forks don’t automatically create a work of biking art.
So it had to be a bike that rides.
I like the elegance of the 1950s Harleys, with their diamond shaped frame showing their bicycle heritage. The seventy-four inchers are also big brutes. From in front or behind you can always tell a Harley, even without the noise, just from the set of it on the road, the heft of the gearbox with its primary drive on the left, so that sense of massiveness is crucial to the bike’s identity.
Bikes are also a bit of an iron horse, they’re meant to have curves, so the shape of the seat, the depth of the mudguard over the back wheel, the thickness of the front tyre and the fullness of the tank are all important to the look.
And I like a clean look, with wires enclosed, nothing unnecessary showing, nothing flash or fancy. Attention to details, that’s what gets the effect, the look.
So my personal choice is for a bobber type look, very much like a 50s bike, but stripped down and tidied up so as to be the core of what it is, white wall tyres, fatbob tanks, foot boards, a pair of cruiser bars.
But I was also into Jap muscle bikes.
There was no club rule against Jap bikes. Sure there were some hard cases who were dead anti. Guys of the ‘Harley is the only bike’ mindset, but for reliability and practicality you couldn’t beat the UJMs. But they had to be real bikes, a basic frame, big engine, no crap. Anyone turning up on some spastic plastic Jap crotch rocket or dresser cruiser would certainly be in for a hard time.
For long distance fast motorway work I had kept a kwacker Z1300, a massive water-cooled wall of six cylinders under a brutal slab-sided tank. A big bulky bike, it was almost completely stock other than a paint job on the tank of Muttley.
For fun I had bought one of the old red and black CBX750s. In contrast to the Z it was slim and light, feeling more like a two-fifty to chuck around than a big bike. It was a bit of a toy, a bit of fun, not the sort of thing on which you would wear your colours when riding and I’d had a Flying Tigers paint job done on it, with shark’s teeth along the bottom of the half fairing. That was the bike I’d lost to Gut’s spanners. I guess that the red and black meant that it was Menace colours hadn’t helped Gut’s mood when I’d pitched up on it that evening.
And then there was my other love, Ohka.
White and pink delicately translucent petals of the sacred falling Cherry Blossom that never returns, were airbrushed onto the silver tank with its massive air scoops down either side, over a precisely inked thin technical drawing style plan showing the top and side views of a small single seater, straight winged aeroplane, the cockpit a greenhouse dome sitting squarely and uprightly amidships along the slim torpedo like body, twin tail fins at the end of a boom like tail plane leaving space clear at the end for three nozzle exhausts.
Naming a brutal single purpose bike like the four cylinder 1400cc V-Max after a Japanese piloted rocket powered flying bomb, the ultimate Kamikaze machine from the dying stages of World War II seemed apt somehow for the street dragster, the fastest accelerating, street legal production vehicle in the world when it was launched on an unsuspecting biking public. The top monster of its time, it was hellishly fast in a straight line, but didn’t really do corners.
I loved it, even as I wrestled with it and it tried to kill me on the bends. It was a monstrous bastard that took brute force to control and quite often scared the shit out of me.
And now Dazza had bought me a Wing, an 1100, one of the last of the naked ones. All low down torque, ‘Cos I know you like a good shaft up the back!’ he pronounced to generally hilarity. He was right, I did. Plenty of grunt and the low centre of gravity meant that on a Wing and with a bit of attitude you could quite often surprise a few people about how fast you could hustle it along.
‘Yeah, just so long as there’s a black rubber at the end of it!’ I joked back, I was really touched. I hadn’t been expecting this, he hadn’t needed to do it. ‘Hey that’s just really great,’ I said, ‘Thanks Dazza!’ opening my arms for a hugged embrace.
And I really meant it. I was touched. And as I was now a Menace I had already decided that there was no other choice as since I already had a Muttley, this bike was going to have to be a Gnasher.
*
I waited until we were into our beers before I picked my moment to ask about Billy.
Dazza was sat on his bike while I stood next to him. He wasn’t very sympathetic I have to say.
‘Billy just needs to do what he’s told. This is just a case of making the most of opportunities, it’s nothing personal about him, it’s just business.’
‘What if he looks for other gear to deal instead?’
Dazza snorted at the thought of that. ‘Come on, where else is he going to buy stuff from apart from me? How’s he going to find another supplier? We don’t exactly advertise do we? Someone that he knows he can trust isn’t going to be a nark?’
‘So you’re not worried?’
‘Nah. It’s always the same. I’ve had this sort of shit over the years, people whingeing on that they don’t like my product, that it’s too cut, that they�
��re going to find someone else. Well fuck ’em I say. They always come crawling back in the end.’ He took another swig of his beer, ‘makes me laugh sometimes really, how’re they going to know it’s poor or too cut? This crap people see in the films about testing gear and finding it’s ninety-nine percent pure. It’s just bollocks mate. Look at Billy for example. Whizzo couldn’t pass woodwork let alone fucking chemistry, so how’s he gonna know that what he gets from anyone else is any better? My stuff’s too expensive? Well tough, just pass it on, like it or lump it. And they always lump it. Because in the end they can’t find anyone else.’
‘OK, but what if they could?’
‘And if he did find someone else well…’ Dazza just shrugged and left it hanging for a moment, the conclusion was fairly obvious really, ‘Bringing competition onto the patch is hardly a very loyal act for a brother is it? Particularly when he knows what we’ve all got at stake.’
Dazza finished his beer and looked down at the bottle for a moment before turning and chucking it over the wall into the field next door.
‘Billy’s got too much of a mouth on him at times.’
‘Hey, what’s the problem? He isn’t talking to anyone else.’
‘Security’s the problem. This is business. He shouldn’t be talking about this shit to anyone you arsehole, you included. Don’t you get that? All this shit is supposed to be compartmentalised. That way no one knows the whole thing and we can keep it tight.’