Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs

by Thompson, Tony

  The small, semi-detached house was just a few miles into Leicestershire. After double-checking they had the right target – the car used to trace the address was parked in the driveway – the men hovered about, unsure of the best way to get into the building, until Rabbi simply kicked open the front door and led the charge upstairs.

  * * *

  The barrel of the gun was so deep inside the mouth of the Ratae that it was making him gag. All Boone had to do was keep squeezing the trigger and it would all be over. But something was holding him back.

  Murder had been in his heart throughout the journey to the man’s house. His rage about what had happened to a fellow Pagan was driving him on: more than anything in the world he wanted the man dead and gone. But at the same time, the Pagan, Rocky, was still alive. Only just, but still alive. And that was getting in the way. Taking a life in return for having put someone in a coma just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do. Boone didn’t want to be the one to push things to the next level.

  He pulled the shotgun from the man’s mouth and used the butt of it to club his victim across the side of the head. Then, without any words being exchanged between them, Boone and the other Pagans repositioned the man on the floor beside his bed with his left arm stretched out, palm downwards, in front of him.

  Calmly and methodically, deaf to the screams of agony that echoed around them, Boone and the others used a heavy claw hammer to break each and every bone in the Ratae’s hand. They finished him off by plunging a hunting knife through the back of his palm, pinning him to the floorboards while they made good their escape.

  During the journey back, Boone was bitterly disappointed and more than a little peeved about what had taken place. At the tender age of nineteen, he’d been given a golden opportunity to kill one of the enemy and he had failed to follow through. He just couldn’t be sure if he had done the right thing.

  There was precious little time to dwell on such issues. Back in their clubhouse, a two-up, two-down terraced property in Leamington Spa, the Pagans began to prepare fortifications, boarding up the windows, sealing the door frames and sinking sharpened metal spikes throughout the back garden that would impale anyone who attempted to jump the wall. The work went on until the early afternoon and once it was complete, there was nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Ratae to make their next move.

  BIKER’S DOZEN

  The Ratae MC started life in the late 1960s when a group of young bikers from Leicester happened across a copy of the cult classic Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S Thompson, recently published in the UK. Seduced by the rebellious ‘fuck the world’ attitude and lifestyle chronicled in the book, they formed a club with the sole intention of recreating everything they had read about, right there in their home town.

  The Hell’s Angels had gained notoriety in the summer of 1964 when two under-age girls claimed they had been raped by four members of the motorcycle gang at a wild beach party near Monterey, California. The charges were quickly dropped, but the case received blanket coverage and established the gang as the ultimate all-American bogeymen. Three years later, Thompson’s book inspired a plethora of copycat clubs making free and easy use of the name all over the world.

  The Leicester lads called themselves the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club Ratae (the latter being the original Roman name for the city). But when the original Hell’s Angels were pulled into shape and officially incorporated by Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, co-founder and president of the Oakland chapter in California (the template for the growing biker movement), membership became strictly regulated and any clubs wishing to join the organisation had to apply direct to the USA. The London Angels received their charter – the first to be granted in Europe – in July 1969 and set about trying to unite other clubs under a single ‘All England’ banner. The Ratae opted out, preferring instead to drop the ‘Hell’s Angels’ part of their name and remain independent.

  Despite being relatively small, the Ratae succeeded in making a name for themselves throughout the county. They embraced any behaviour that was likely to cause offence, got banned from most of the pubs in town and were regularly vilified in the pages of their local newspaper. More than anything, they loved to fight. They brawled with other bikers but also with skinheads, mods, punks and even the police.

  In 1971, they achieved a new level of notoriety after starting a riot at a Who concert. The gang had gatecrashed the gig at Leicester University and immediately began, in the words of guitarist Pete Townshend, ‘idiot dancing over everyone’, forcing the band to stop playing in the middle of ‘Pinball Wizard’. When Townshend admonished the bikers, one of the Ratae joined him on stage and blindsided him with a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, leaving a head wound that required eight stitches.

  A few years on, the Ratae found themselves at war with a Coventry MC called the Slaves. A series of tit-for-tat clashes escalated, until both gangs gathered their forces to settle the dispute once and for all. In the brawl that followed, one of the Ratae stabbed the president of the Slaves, and the two sides ended up in a massive Mexican stand-off with dozens of guns trained on one another. Eventually both gangs decided to stand down but as they were leaving, a petrol bomb was thrown and one of the Ratae was set ablaze.

  The president of the club, Scout, ordered that rather than trying to douse the flames, the burning man should be thrown out of the back of the now speeding vehicle to prevent the fire from spreading. Such a request didn’t seem to completely fit in with the spirit of brotherhood that most MCs claim to have at their core, but Scout ruled his club with an iron fist and no one ever questioned his orders. The human fireball was quickly ejected.

  Right from the start, the Warwickshire Pagans were cut from a different cloth. First coming together in 1978, they saw themselves as part of a new wave of biking culture while groups like the Ratae were something of a filthy throwback.

  Using Hunter S Thompson’s book as their bible, Ratae members insisted on following every depraved ritual and tradition they could find. They awarded one another ‘wing’ patches for public acts of oral sex – white for a white girl, black for a black girl and red for a girl who was on her period. They also followed the supposedly official initiation ceremony during which a bucket of dung and urine is collected and then tipped over the head of the new member. The mixture is worked into their jeans and patches and thereafter, the items, dubbed ‘originals’, can never be washed. They have to be worn until they are literally falling apart and are then worn over other clothes to further extend their life.

  Although the ceremony is detailed in Hell’s Angels, such practices were never as widespread as the journalist was led to believe and by the 1970s most bikers had significantly cleaned up their acts. No one in the Pagans had any wish to be defiled or degraded. When they saw the Ratae wearing their filthy jackets, they thought they looked stupid. With two completely opposed ideologies, it was clear the two clubs were never going to get along.

  The Pagans chose blue and white as their colours and announced from the start that they had no alliances. They had no desire to be Hell’s Angels or part of any other, larger club. Their commitment was to bike riding and partying and to being themselves, which meant being ready to honour and protect their club’s colours at any cost. To be a member of the Pagans was to live the life of a hedonist twenty-four hours a day.

  Warwickshire had been more or less unopposed when the club started up, but there were still plenty of opportunities for fighting. Any side patch or MCC deemed to be too big for their boots would be taken out of the picture and any club daring to wear the Pagan colours would have hell to pay. By the mid-eighties, membership of the Pagans had grown to around twenty-five, many of who, like Boone, hailed from upmarket, well-to-do towns in the county like Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare.

  Their neutral stance meant that the Pagans could party with anyone. The Hell’s Angels one week, the Cycle Tramps from Birmingham
the next, the Scorpio from Cornwall whenever they were in town. They had even partied with the Ratae. Boone had been a lowly prospect at the time and not privy to what had been going on at the higher levels of the organisation, but he recalled a tense evening with the deep animosity between the two sides smouldering away all night. He felt like a schoolkid being told to play nice with the kids from across the street while their parents did their best to make small talk.

  The experience was not to be repeated. The next time Boone heard anything about the Ratae was when their prospect turned up inside the club’s territory.

  Scout’s vision for the future was crystal clear: it was going to be an absolute bloodbath. He wanted far more than just simple revenge: he had decided that the Pagans should be taken out completely. The Ratae were going to wipe their rivals off the face of the earth and assume control of Warwickshire in one fell swoop.

  Bikers from all corners of the Ratae empire, including gangs from Lincolnshire and Norfolk, were drafted in to join the attack and by the time the convoy of cars and vans and bikes reached the outskirts of Coventry, there were more than eighty of them. Once in the city centre they immediately sought out members of the Slaves, the same gang they had previously clashed with.

  The local MC was no friend of the Ratae, but they didn’t exactly see eye to eye with the Pagans either. The Warwickshire gang significantly outnumbered and outgunned the Slaves and the two clubs had existed in a state of cold war for some years. Thanks to their healthy fear of Scout in particular and the rest of the gang in general, the Coventry boys did not hesitate to explain exactly how to get to the Pagans clubhouse in Leamington Spa, seizing the chance to build bridges with the Ratae and potentially rid themselves of an enemy at the same time.

  The arrival of the massive convoy had not gone unnoticed by Coventry police, who initially believed that the Ratae had come to town to war with the Slaves. By the time officers arrived at the meeting between the two, the Ratae were just leaving. Seeing that no one was hurt, that nothing was broken and that no crimes appeared to have been committed, the Coventry force simply escorted the bikers to the edge of their jurisdiction and then let them carry on, assuming they were heading home to Leicestershire.

  The Pagans themselves were under no such illusion: within minutes of the Ratae leaving Coventry, a tip-off had been rung through to George Street from a friend of the club who was aware of the events of the preceding days, had seen the numerous shotguns the Ratae were wielding and was deeply concerned about where it all might lead.

  Once news of the approaching convoy had been received, little discussion was needed. With only thirteen of them on duty at the clubhouse, the Pagans knew they were horribly outnumbered. A few urgent phone calls were made to other members who lived further afield telling them to drop everything and rush to Leamington, but even if everyone managed to get there in time, there would still only be thirty of them at most. The Pagans rarely backed away from a fight, even when the odds were against them, but it was clear that this particular battle was not going to end well. Discretion was, they decided, the better part of valour: they would abandon the clubhouse and wait to fight another day.

  The group headed to Boone’s place, crossing the river into the north east of the town, and settled down with a few beers. But as they were sitting there, sniggering to one another about how disappointed the Ratae would be to find the place deserted, they suddenly realised that the Pagans they had called in to back them up were still on their way. Back then, mobile phones were just a gleam in the eye of telecoms engineers. Once someone was en route somewhere, there was simply no way to get in touch with them. If the other Pagans arrived at the same time as the Ratae, they were going to be slaughtered.

  ‘Shit,’ said Caz. ‘We can’t abandon them. We’re going to have to go back.’ No one was happy about the order but they all quickly agreed they had no choice. It’s one in, all in. They traipsed back across the river and made their way to George Street and whatever fate awaited them.

  The fortifications had been designed to give them some measure of protection but with such a large number of attackers on their way, it seemed unlikely they would last long. Tank recalled seeing an old black and white film about a siege in which the defenders deliberately left an obvious weak spot so that the attackers would focus all their attention there, allowing the defenders to pick them off more easily. The Pagans decided to do the same, removing the metal grid they had placed over a low-level panel in the door, though none of them were sure if the Ratae would be dumb enough to fall for such a trick.

  In many ways they had no choice. As a terraced property you could only attack the clubhouse from the front or the back. The gate to the back garden had been secured making it impossible to open. The rest of the rear was protected by an eight-foot high wall, topped with shards of broken glass. If anyone managed to get over it, they would have to jump down into the garden where dozens of sharpened three-foot long metal spikes waited to impale them. The front of the house, especially with that one vulnerable spot, would seem like a far better option.

  The thirteen Pagans had just about finished making the adjustments to the fortifications and defences when Dozer suddenly realised there was someone else they had to worry about. ‘Fuck! We’ve forgotten about Maz Harris,’ he gasped.

  As a writer for most of the major biker magazines and founder member of the Kent chapter of the Hell’s Angels, Dr Ian ‘Maz’ Harris was already a legendary figure in the motorcycling world. He had obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick for a thesis entitled ‘Myth and Reality in Motorcycle Subculture’ and had since become the official Angels public relations man, presenting a far more articulate, intelligent and media-friendly face than previously possible. He had also become the envy of most of the MC scene by being appointed an official tester of Harley Davidson in the UK. But most importantly, Maz was also a regular in the Colonnade pub, three doors down from the Pagans clubhouse.

  ‘What’s this got to do with Maz?’ asked Boone. ‘They’re after us, not him.’

  ‘Yeah, but if it spills over and he gets caught up in it and hurt, then we’ll have the Red and White on our backs as well. Someone needs to get over there and tell him to piss off.’

  Tank drew the short straw and found himself heading to the pub to pass on the news, desperately hoping the enemy didn’t turn up at that precise moment. He arrived to find Maz sitting in his usual seat at the bar sipping at a pint. He rushed over to him, almost breathless with excitement. ‘Listen mate, you’d better get the hell out of here,’ he told him. ‘There are eighty fucking Ratae tooled up to the eyeballs and on their way over so I suggest you make yourself discreet.’

  Maz simply shook his head. ‘Listen Sonny, you’re only young. You don’t know what you’re on about because it’s all new to you. I’ve been around for a while so you should listen to what I’m about to tell you. Here’s the thing: if the Ratae are in Coventry brandishing weapons and what not, I can tell you now they’ve got no intention of coming here. No intention at all. It’s all a show. They’re doing it to scare you. They’re doing it so you get in touch with them and stop all this trouble. That’s all. It’s all a storm in a teacup. You’ve nothing to worry about. You should calm down.’

  Tank couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing: it was as if he was speaking to someone from another planet. Tank may have been young but the events of the past few days had left no doubt in this mind that the Ratae were deadly serious and not the type of gang to simply put on a pointless show of force. But it didn’t really matter what Maz thought. They had covered themselves with the Angels by telling him what was going on. If he didn’t feel the need to act on the information, that was down to him. And if he ended up getting hurt, he’d only have himself to blame.

  Back at the house, Boone sat at the base of the stairs and slipped out of his patches. He unzipped and took off his leather jacket so he was wearing only his t-shirt. He put his patches back on and zipped his jacket over the to
p of them. Dozer, who had been sitting on the beer-stained sofa at the side of the room, was looking on, his face slowly morphing into a confused frown.

  ‘What you doing bro?’

  ‘They’re not getting my fucking patches,’ said Boone.

  Dozer shook his head slowly. ‘Really? I’m dying with mine on.’

  The words took Boone’s breath away like a kick in the gut. So much had happened so quickly that there had been precious little opportunity to take stock. Now for the first time the full reality of the situation they were facing, of what was about to happen, began to dawn on him. This was serious. This was totally fucking serious.

  ‘What do you mean dying?’

  ‘Come on Dog. You don’t think we’re getting out of this alive do you?’

  ‘Shit. Fuck. I don’t think we are as it goes.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Boone was surprised to see how steady his hands were as he unzipped his jacket for the second time, removed his patches, replaced his jacket and restored his patches to their rightful place over the top. He then turned to Dozer, a sudden wave of absolute calm washing over him.

  ‘I’m with you. I’m dying with mine on as well.’

  SIEGE

  Stationed downstairs at the front of the house, his view of the street obscured by the barricades and boarded-up windows, Boone could only hear, not see, the arrival of the Ratae raiding party. Tyres screeched and screamed as the first vehicles appeared. Dozens of heavy boots stomped up and down the pavement outside; iron crowbars and baseball bats clattered and clanged against the metal grids as the attackers probed for weaknesses. Above it all was Scout’s voice, manically barking orders like an insane general at the head of an invading army.

  Throughout the house, each Pagan had chosen his battle station. Boone, armed with a heavy pickaxe handle, was on one side of the door panel that had deliberately been left vulnerable. Opposite him stood Link, grasping the Webley sawn-off shotgun – the only firearm in the house – so tightly that all the blood had drained out of his knuckles. Two more Pagans were at the back of the property and four more in the centre of the living room as a floating backup. The remainder were spread across the second floor, guarding the top of the stairs and manning the windows that overlooked the street. But if all went according to plan, it was Link and Boone who would bear the brunt of the first wave of attack.