Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs

by Thompson, Tony

  The gang kept many of its drug stocks in well-hidden stashes: £20,000 worth of amphetamines was known to have been buried in Southway Woods, but a team of police and army engineers using dogs and metal detectors failed to find it.

  * * *

  Most of the Scorpio ended up on remand in Exmoor prison while the majority of the Pagans were taken to Shrewsbury. Boone, however, was initially taken to Winson Green in Birmingham where around fifty members of the Ratae and their supporters were being held.

  When the police officers escorting him there had tried to remove his patches, he objected in the strongest possible terms. ‘You’ll have to fight me for them,’ he said bitterly. ‘There’s no way I’m going to give them to you.’

  As they approached the prison, Boone tried to hide his fear. He knew full well that this was the place that all the Ratae would have been taken. It was the last place he wanted to be but at the same time his sense of machismo would not let him ask the police for any assistance. He was taken to the reception area to be signed over to the prison guards. At one point he happened to turn around, allowing the prison officer to see his back patch for the first time.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter mate. Just take him.’

  ‘Not in this jail we won’t. He’ll get fucking killed.’

  The police officers were desperate to get rid of him but the prison guards were equally adamant about not taking him on. Boone had already decided that if he was booked into the prison, the first thing he was going to do was to attack the largest Ratae he could see. He knew he would get more jail time because of it, but it had to be the wisest course of action. He wasn’t prepared to die in prison, and if he didn’t take the initiative, that would be just what happened.

  One of the guards turned to him: ‘Sorry about this lad. Bit of a fuck up. It’s not your fault but there’s no way you can come in here.’

  ‘That’s not a problem. I didn’t really want to anyway.’

  A couple of hours later he was in Shrewsbury, alongside virtually all of his club mates. They swapped stories about how they had evaded arrest, how they had been caught and what they had heard about the precise nature of cases against them. But by far the greatest topic of conversation during the months that followed was the revelation about the size of the Scorpio’s drug dealing network and the massive profits the gang had been making. The Pagans had dabbled in various forms of criminality over the years – mostly bike theft and some low level insurance fraud – but nothing on the scale of their colleagues in Cornwall.

  For the first time, they could see a whole new world of highly profitable possibilities out there.

  INSIDE MAN

  The Hell’s Angels refer to them as the Big House Crew while their arch rivals, the Outlaws, have dubbed them the Lounge Lizards; but for the Warwickshire Pagans who suddenly found themselves with more members incarcerated than out in the free world, no special name was needed for their brothers behind bars: to all intents and purposes, the entire club had been locked up.

  By the time the bikers had their first mass court appearance, the police were still struggling to work out exactly what had happened in the run-up to Rabbi’s death and the true motive behind the sudden outbreak of violence. While this process was ongoing, Boone and the others found themselves being held under some of the most vague charges ever issued in British legal history: ‘conspiracy to do things unknown with persons unknown at places unknown some time between the 1st and the 31st of May 1986’.

  The initial murder case was soon dropped through lack of supporting evidence but more than a dozen Pagans found themselves accused of manslaughter. Tank managed to avoid being connected to Rabbi’s death but Boone and in particular Link, who was covered in gunshot residue thanks to the time he had spent shooting up old cars and fridges with a couple of shotguns, did not. Unfortunately, the code of silence meant there was nothing any of them could do to defend themselves.

  It’s a moral dilemma that hardcore MC members face on a regular basis. When a group of Hell’s Angels roared into a supermarket petrol station in Cardiff, one driver at an adjacent pump, Neil Lake, stared at the bikers a little too long, prompting one of them to approach him. ‘Have you got a problem?’ the man asked. Before Lake could reply, the Angel struck him hard in the face. That single blow with a heavy gloved hand caused multiple fractures and Lake needed three metal plates inserted into his skull to repair the damage.

  The bikers rode off but Lake managed to write down the registration number of the Harley Davidson his attacker was riding. The machine was quickly traced to a man named Sean Timmins, a long-standing member of the Angels Wolverhampton chapter. Arrested and charged with the assault, Timmins made no comment until his court case began some months later where he explained to the jury that he had been more than one hundred miles away at the time of the attack and that another Angel had copied his number plate.

  ‘I went nuts when he told me. I know his name but it’s against Hell’s Angels rules to tell you it, even if it means me going to jail. I would be kicked out of the club. We don’t blab on each other and that’s a fact. If that means being held in contempt of this court so be it. I know I’m in a serious position but I can’t tell you who it is – I would rather go to jail. I’ve been arrested for something I haven’t done. I made a “no comment” interview to the police because in the Hell’s Angels we don’t make statements – the rules of the club prevent it. Even if you are in jeopardy, these are the rules of the club.’

  Timmins was cleared of the vicious assault and left court a free man but the most extreme example of suffering the consequences of following this rule involved John Megson, the vice-president of a small but well-respected Rotherham-based MC called the Druids.

  Megson went on to become a legendary figure in the one percenter community after being wrongly accused of stabbing a man to death at a campsite party. Megson refused to give evidence at his trial and, despite knowing which of his club mates was truly responsible, continued to keep his mouth shut even when he was given a mandatory life sentence with a minimum term of fifteen years.

  While in prison his father, Shaun, repeatedly pleaded with him to tell the truth but Megson insisted he had to stick to the code of silence, an edict the Druids had actually included as part of their written constitution: ‘Rule 9: No statements to be made to any police’. Week in, week out, Shaun tried to wear him down but Megson would not shift an inch. But then the Druids who had initially been visiting Megson on a regular basis began to drift away. He found himself wondering if the bond of brotherhood he believed was at the heart of the club was actually nothing more than fancy window dressing. His doubts grew further when he learned that, during his trial, the remaining Druids had sold his motorcycle and spent the proceeds on a massive drinking binge.

  ‘If they had kept visiting him I wouldn’t have stood a chance,’ Shaun said later. ‘One day I thought, fuck it; he was going to tell me one way or another. I decided to tell him that if he didn’t give me the name, I would stop visiting him just like they had done. He would be on his own.’

  The pair sat in the visiting room of Wakefield prison and stared at each other in silence for some time. Megson insisted he still could not say anything so Shaun suggested he write it down. The only piece of paper to hand was a wrapper from a chocolate bar. The moment Megson finished writing his father snatched the note away. It read: ‘Colin “Animal” McCombie’.

  But even then, Megson refused to make any kind of official statement and continued to serve his sentence. He was ultimately saved by Stella Harris, former girlfriend of another club member, who was shocked to see how little the remaining Druids were doing for Megson and came forward to name the real killer. The Druids did their best to ‘persuade’ Harris to change her mind, forcing her to move home and seek shelter among the Henchmen MC, a notorious biker gang in north Wales led by the formidable Stuart ‘Dink’ Dawson. With Dink as her protector, Harris remained in Wal
es until she gave evidence at a retrial, after which Megson was finally released. He had served five years.

  Eager to ensure none of their own members turned against the club, the remaining Pagans did their level best to guarantee that everyone in custody received as much support as possible. Monies were taken out of the club’s funds to pay bills and help families put food on the table. Arrangements were made for childcare so that wives and girlfriends could be driven up for regular visits; freelance workers were recruited so that small businesses being run by club members were able to keep going.

  In the one percenter MC world it is generally accepted that you need a minimum of six full patch members to form or maintain a chapter. Below this number it is considered to be impossible to control territory and avoid losing it to another group. At first there were just seven full patch Pagans left at liberty but, fearing more troubles to come, the numbers fell once more until the club consisted of just one full member and two prospects. Had the Warwickshire gang been a mere chapter of a larger organisation, it would have been dissolved. As an independent MC, the Pagans were just about able to wing it.

  What helped enormously was that the club had managed to maintain good relations with most of the gangs in the surrounding areas. To the west in Birmingham were the Cycle Tramps and a little further out the Wolverhampton chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Bordering the Pagans territory to the north west in Staffordshire were the Eagles MC. To the north in Derbyshire were the Road Tramps with whom the Pagans had regularly partied and to the north east in Leicestershire were the Pariah MC, the other gang to have fallen out with the Ratae. To the south west, in the Gloucestershire city of Cheltenham, was a small gang called the Wolf Outlaws.

  When it came to Rabbi’s funeral the Cycle Tramps literally put themselves in the firing line of the remnants of the Ratae by agreeing to be pall-bearers and help out with security during the service and procession. Friends and associates of the club chipped in as best they could and a local MCC, the Road Rejects, was picked clean of all those who had any potential to make it into the Pagans by signing them up as prospects.

  The club didn’t ease up on giving out actual patches – if anything it became even harder to get into and it was an open secret that many of those who were being allowed onto the fringes of the gang would not normally have made the cut. But bolstering the number of prospects and hangarounds at least gave the impression of strength of numbers while the remaining members were on remand pending trial.

  The first few weeks inside were relatively easy: Boone had never been behind bars before and, having never had much time for figures of authority, he initially struggled in such a controlled environment but was helped by the fact that so many of his club mates were with him at the time.

  The prison wing was horribly overcrowded so not only did everyone have to share their accommodation but the prisoners on remand were being mixed in with those who had actually been convicted. Boone and Link spent a few weeks bunking together before Link was moved and Boone got a new cellmate, Dean ‘Trotter’ Taylor, an MC member with whom he shared a common enemy.

  Trotter belonged to the Coventry Slaves MC and had also ended up inside as a result of a clash with the Ratae. Along with a few of his club mates, Trotter had travelled to Leicester with several sawn-off shotguns to attempt to retrieve some patches that had been taken from a club member during a brawl. Trotter had been sentenced to three years for aggravated burglary. He was a bit of a nutcase but a fun nutcase and would regularly have the whole wing in stitches.

  Although the Pagans partly blamed the Slaves for giving away their location to the Ratae prior to the attack on the George Street clubhouse, Trotter had been on remand at the time so hadn’t been involved. He and Boone soon bonded, especially when they talked about Trotter’s beloved and pristine Triumph Bonneville 750 motorcycle, a machine almost identical to the one Richard Gere had ridden in the hit film An Officer and a Gentleman.

  Boone and Trotter would spend hours discussing the curious world of the one percenter, trying but usually failing to come up with a comprehensive answer as to why anyone would risk so much for the sake of a patch, why under certain circumstances otherwise ordinary family men were prepared to kill and maim one another.

  The closest they came was the realisation that it wasn’t really to do with the patch or even the actual club at all. Like soldiers in any war, they fought not for their country or even for freedom; they fought for each other. The men in an MC chapter knew each other better than they knew their wives and girlfriends. Their dedication and loyalty knew no bounds. The spilling of blood in the midst of desperate battle made them as close as any blood tie could have done. It was all about the fact that, whatever struggle they were going through, that struggle was always shared.

  There was no doubt in Boone’s mind that some of the Pagans would see prison as a turning point, a bridge too far, and leave the club as soon as they got an opportunity, despite the best efforts of those around them to persuade them to do otherwise. But Boone could also see that there would be others, like himself, who felt the death of Rabbi had brought them closer together. And at that moment he knew that the Pagans would be a part of his life until the day he died.

  * * *

  The authorities soon realised that having so many bikers belonging to one gang all in the same prison was something of a ticking time bomb and constituted a serious threat to the safety of the staff. The guards became particularly concerned about the steady stream of burly, tattooed visitors who on more than one occasion were suspected of planning to break one of the inmates out.

  Trotter was released after a couple of months and Boone was on his own for a few days before having a new cellmate assigned to him. He didn’t pay too much attention to this newcomer – he was too preoccupied with himself and a forthcoming court appearance. They had talked briefly about the reasons they were being held in custody and while Boone didn’t pay much attention, something about the story the man was telling didn’t make much sense.

  Then, a couple of days later, the news came on the radio and there was a story about a man who had been arrested for abusing children. Boone spoke his mind: ‘They shouldn’t arrest him, they should take him outside and fucking shoot him,’ he said. His cellmate shook his head. ‘You say that now, but you’d let him shag your kids for a million pounds.’

  And then it suddenly clicked that the story Boone had been told hadn’t made much sense at all. Boone was sharing his cell with a paedophile. ‘You’re a fucking sex case you are.’ The pair stood frozen to the spot for a split second then the cellmate dived for the panic bell. He just managed to hit it when Boone was on him, laying into him with punches and kicks. The attack lasted only a few seconds before the door flew open and a team of prison guards, batons at the ready, stormed in.

  Boone curled up into a ball, waiting for the guards to start pounding him but nothing happened. He peered out from behind his forearms and saw them dragging the paedophile out of the cell.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ asked Boone.

  ‘You fucker. I lost 200 quid on you,’ said the nearest guard. ‘I bet you’d suss him on the first night. You let me down there. Let me down big time.’

  Repeatedly denied bail on the ground that he had fled once and was likely to do so again, Boone spent almost a year on remand, finally being released under a host of restrictions, just in time to read the first reports from the other big biker trial of the year.

  In April 1987, the ten members and associates of the Scorpio MC who had been arrested in the Operation Enmesh drug bust stood trial at Plymouth Crown Court. After just two days, the proceedings had to be abandoned after an ‘evil looking’ woman told four of the jurors that their faces would be remembered and they would regret any guilty verdicts.

  A police investigation failed to track the woman down and the judge felt he had no option but to order a retrial. Second time round the case proceeded without interruption and all the defendants were convicted. Mark �
��Snoopy’ Dyce was given nine years for conspiracy to supply drugs as well as aggravated burglary. The story was reported widely and made the front page of the Sunday Times though, in keeping with the popular misconceptions of the time, the press universally referred to the gang as ‘Hell’s Angels’.

  The first Operation Biker trial began just as the Plymouth hearings were coming to an end. Because there were so many defendants – at least sixty in total – the cases were split up into six different trials, some taking place in Leicester, the others in Northampton.

  In June twenty-five members of the Ratae were jailed for their part in the violence, both the attack on the George Street clubhouse and the numerous clashes that had led up to it. The longest sentence was handed out to Scout himself who was given ten years for conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm and carrying offensive weapons.

  A week later, a further twelve bikers – a mixture of Pagans and Ratae – were sent down and the trial involving the remaining members of the Pagans also came to an end with all but one found guilty and given sentences ranging from six months to five years. Seven Pagans were also convicted of the manslaughter of Rabbi with the longest term of nine years being handed down to Link. Although they had nothing to do with the death of their friend, their adherence to the code of silence meant they were unable to say a single word in their own defence.

  Although the two cases represented a massive victory for law enforcement, they made precious little progress when it came to throwing any light on the MC world. The Scorpio had been pursued because they had been causing havoc and selling drugs throughout Cornwall. The fact that they were a biker gang was seen as nothing more than a coincidence, particularly as the club was active in such an isolated area. No one thought to wonder if similar activities were going on with other MCs elsewhere in the country and in the world.