Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs

by Thompson, Tony

  Bikes were kept in a secure compound next to the clubhouse, which was monitored by surveillance cameras twenty-four hours a day. Whenever bikes had to be left in a public place, they were checked carefully for any devices before being started. Ideally, a prospect would stand guard over the bikes while other members did whatever it was that they had to do. Every member had been told to acquire a mirror on the end of a stick, which they could use to check the underside of any car before they climbed into it. For the Midland Outlaws it initially seemed over the top, but once they heard a few of the stories about the casualties of the war the Canadian bikers had been fighting, saw some of the pictures and shared some of the horror, they realised it was all completely necessary.

  Every now and then, someone would slip up and get into a car without checking and the result would be a huge shouting match. It was just about the worst thing you could do and the only way to drill that into people seemed to be to remind them if they messed up in the strongest possible terms. The Brits even saw a few bikers get knocked down a patch or two because they messed up their security protocols.

  In Ottawa, the Midland Outlaws were driven around in a huge stretch limo that had a leaky petrol tank. ‘We don’t need to worry about the Angels in this thing,’ said Caz, ‘one big bump in the road and we’re fucking dead anyway.’

  Every clubhouse had an area at the back with railway sleepers fixed with targets that were used for shooting practice. Most of the time the Outlaws made a game out of it, shooting for shots of whiskey or bourbon. Splitting into small groups, the idea was the person whose shot landed furthest from the bullseye had to drink. When it came to Boone’s turn, he deliberately shot wide. The longer the game went on, the worse for wear he became and the poorer his shooting got.

  ‘You’re really terrible at this,’ commented one Outlaw.

  ‘Yeah, but I want the whiskey. You guys have got it all ass about face.’

  With a wide variety of guns legally available, every member of the Midland Outlaws had the opportunity to learn to shoot and become one hundred per cent comfortable with a range of handguns, rifles and shotguns. The only possible downside was that the quality of the weapons available in Canada was so high that Boone knew they would be disappointed once they got back to the UK. No doubt, they’d miss the top-quality drugs too. The Midland Outlaws had used cocaine on a recreational level and at parties back home, but in Canada there was a mountain of the stuff and their hosts seemed to insist on taking it at every opportunity – breakfast, lunch and dinner. At least one of Boone’s colleagues had to go into detox back home.

  By the time they returned to England the Midland Outlaws were a very different gang. The bikers had grown in confidence. They had got a taste of what it might be like to be part of a larger, more powerful international organisation, one with the money and resources and men to compete with the likes of the Hell’s Angels on more or less equal terms. They had learnt how to survive in the midst of a gang war and seen that, although it generated its own unique difficulties, it was still possible to live a mostly normal life. More importantly, they had once again seen just how much money could be made from getting seriously involved in the drug trade. It was time for the club to do the same.

  If the Angels in Canada knew about the arrival of the Midland Outlaws, then it was a fair assumption that the Angels in England had also clocked the trip. Having initially denied that the group had any affiliation with the AOA, the Midland Outlaws had now been caught out partying with the sworn enemy. They might just as well have gone up to the Angels clubhouse in Wolverhampton, knocked on the door and given the entire chapter the finger. So far as acts of provocation go, they did not come much more blatant than this one.

  14

  THE FAT MEXICAN

  May 1993

  Before the Midland Outlaws could put any of their new-found skills to the test, they received a further opportunity to broaden their travel horizons. Days after they returned from Canada, Rainer called to tell them about a forthcoming party taking place at the Paul Ricard Circuit, a motor-sport race track in Le Castellet near Marseille in the south of France. The event, organised by the sole European chapter of an MC called the Bandidos, was strictly invitation only but Rainer said he would arrange everything and meet them there.

  Boone and the others found it all quite bemusing. As individual clubs of twenty or thirty members, no one outside of the UK would have given them the time of day. Now that they were all together, everyone wanted to be their friend. The reasons were clear. With more than 120 members, the Midland Outlaws were not only bigger than the Angels in the UK, they were bigger than just about any other club in any other European country. Even most clubs in most American states had fewer members than they did. The Midland Outlaws had discovered that they had real clout, and they were happy to make the most of it.

  Beyond the obvious attraction of a long May weekend spent drinking and partying on the banks of the Mediterranean – and the secondary benefit of having a chance to shift a load of stolen travellers cheques that Boone had managed to acquire – the invitation also represented an opportunity to get to know members of a fast-growing gang that was increasingly being seen as a real contender for the premier MC crown.

  In the spring of 1966, in the tiny shrimp and oyster fishing community of San Leon, Texas, just as the star of the Hell’s Angels was on the rise, a thirty-six-year-old longshoreman named Donald Chambers read about the exploits of Sonny Barger and co and felt certain he could go one better.

  A former US Marine, Chambers had been hooked on motorcycles from an early age and was national secretary of a small MC called the Reapers. Although he enjoyed the camaraderie, the parties and the women, the Reapers were just a little too tame for him, so Chambers decided to launch a club of his own. A huge admirer of Pancho Villa and other Mexican revolutionaries who had lived as free men outside the rules of society, he named his new club ‘Bandidos’. For a logo he chose a cartoon image of a big-bellied bandit wearing a sombrero while brandishing a pistol and a machete. (A common misconception is that Chambers was inspired by a TV advert featuring Frito Bandito, a sombrero-wearing Mexican bandit who stole the popular brand of corn chips, but the commercial first aired after the MC was launched.)

  Chambers liked to drink, loved to fight and wasn’t afraid to use his knife. When it came to finding recruits for his club, he wanted men just like himself – total badasses. He trawled local bars and found them among the thousands of disillusioned Vietnam veterans who returned from the killing fields of South-East Asia only to learn that they no longer fitted in. They were men who had gotten bored sitting at home trying to be nice after the government had trained and taught them to be anything but.

  The club grew rapidly and soon had several chapters in Texas and a few in neighbouring states, helped in no small part by Chambers’ attitude to race. While the Hell’s Angels operated a strict ‘whites-only’ policy, Chambers not only welcomed Hispanics into the Bandidos but also used Spanish for the titles of its officers: El Presidente, El Secretario, Sargento De Armas and so on. While officers in other clubs wore their titles discreetly on the front of their patches, the Bandidos wore them on their backs in place of their bottom rockers.

  Chambers printed up special gold-coloured calling cards for members to give out to citizens they encountered. Embossed in red at the top of each card was the club motto: ‘We are the people our parents warned us about.’ In the lower left corner were the initials ‘FTW’. And in the middle of each card were the words ‘Bandido by profession, Biker by trade, Lover by choice, You have just had the honour of meeting …’, followed by that particular member’s signature.

  Although mostly composed of working stiffs like Chambers himself, it didn’t take long for the Bandidos to make the move from riding and partying to involvement in a range of criminal activities including motorcycle theft, prostitution and drug trafficking.

  In 1972, Chambers and two other Bandidos abducted a couple of drug dealers from El
Paso, Texas, who had made the mistake of attempting to rip the gang off. They had sold the bikers a quantity of amphetamine, which turned out to be baking soda. The two men, one aged twenty-two and the other just seventeen, were tortured for several days before being driven out to the desert north of the city and forced to dig their own graves. The pair were then shot dead and their corpses set alight. Chambers and his cohorts were convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

  Another ex-Marine, Ronnie Hodge, once known as ‘Mr Prospect’ because he had earned his full colours in only a month, was elected as the new National President and immediately set about purging the club of any members he felt were not sufficiently hardcore to wear the patch. At least two entire chapters were closed down as a result of his actions but the end result was a club with members every bit as determined and dedicated as the Hell’s Angels, if not more so. Under his reign, dozens of Bandidos were arrested for dealing drugs, running prostitution rings, extorting money from the owners of bars and strip clubs – even operating illegal pit bull fights.

  In 1978, Hodge led a contingent of the new and improved Bandidos to Bike Week in Daytona Beach. It was their first time at the rally and whilst there they met up with members of the dominant MC, the Outlaws. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The Outlaws had forged links with Colombian and Cuban dealers who provided them with cocaine, while the Bandidos had mastered the art of manufacturing high-quality methamphetamine from numerous household products. Joining forces allowed both clubs to massively expand their drug interests.

  Ultimately the two clubs signed a non-aggression pact and began to refer to one another as ‘sister’ organisations. Some members went so far as to tattoo themselves with the colours of the other club as a further mark of respect.

  Around this same time, the Bandidos received their own Monteray-style bad publicity boost when they became prime suspects in two of Texas’s most notorious shootings. The first involved the attempted murder of San Antonio assistant US attorney James Kerr who was shot at several times while close to home. A few months later US district judge John Wood Jr. who was known as Maximum John for his merciless sentences for drug offenders, was shot in the back outside his home and killed.

  Kerr identified three Bandidos in a police line-up as his possible assailants while in the Wood case more than one hundred Bandidos were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury and the whole organisation came under the glare of the media spotlight. Newsweek described the Bandidos as ‘the single greatest organized crime problem’ in Texas, and a segment on ABC’s 20/20 news magazine show observed that seven of the club’s eight national officers had criminal records ‘involving drugs, guns, or violence’.

  The Bandidos insisted that they had not shot at the prosecutor or murdered the judge and that the only reason they were being harassed by police was because of their anti-establishment way of life. As Ronnie Hodge put it to Newsweek: ‘We’re the last free Americans.’ As with the Angels and Monteray, the Bandidos were eventually vindicated. Members of an El Paso crime family, the Chagras, were eventually convicted of hiring hit man Charles Harrelson, father of actor Woody Harrelson, to carry out both attacks. The Bandidos celebrated by throwing huge parties and giving the finger to any cops that they saw. Not only were they innocent but the club was now more infamous than ever.

  Consummate politicians, the Bandidos took advantage of their raised profile to continue to expand by offering the Hell’s Angels a deal they could not refuse. Concerned about the potential expansion of the Outlaws, the Angels happily agreed to allow the Bandidos to open up chapters in free states in order to act as a buffer between the two clubs.

  In 1983, the same year that Donald Chambers was released from prison and retired from the club, the Bandidos stumbled across a golden opportunity to expand overseas into Australia. It was a move that, within the space of a year, would lead to one of the most notorious and bloodiest incidents in biker history: the Milperra Bikie Massacre.

  In the spring of 1989, the Bandidos expanded into Europe for the first time when nine members of the Club de Clichy in Marseille flew to South Dakota in order to attend the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Once there, they were officially patched over during a ceremony presided over by Ronnie Hodge himself. Clichy had spent three years as a club prospect before being judged to have reached the standard required for its members to wear the Fat Mexican on their backs.

  Alarmed at this incursion onto a continent they had always seen as their own, the Hell’s Angels responded in typically bloodthirsty fashion. In August 1991 the vice-president of the Marseille chapter of the Bandidos was killed and two others injured in front of the clubhouse in a drive-by shooting by four men on motorcycles.

  The murder turned out to be the joint work of two Hell’s Angel puppet clubs, one of which had provided the manpower and the other the stolen bikes to be used as getaway vehicles. By now the message to the MC world was loud and clear: wherever the Bandidos went, violence seemed certain to follow.

  Just a few short years earlier – despite their close friendship with the Outlaws – the Bandidos had been considered neutral enough to host peace talks between the two rivals (these took place during the Sturgis rally and ultimately came to nothing). Now they had just as much reason to despise the Angels as their sister club, and all the more reason to befriend those who felt the same way.

  In May 1993, the ten-strong party of Midland Outlaws arrived in Marseille Provence Airport and made their way to the Paul Ricard Circuit in a small convoy of hired cars, expecting to receive a warm welcome from the Bandidos. Not only had Rainer, one of the leading lights of the AOA, personally arranged their invitation, but they also fully shared their hosts’ animosity towards the Angels. In the event, both trump cards turned out to be worse than useless.

  Boone and the others arrived at the entrance gate and gave the club name. The prospects who were on guard duty went away to check and asked them to wait. And wait. And wait. Eventually a more senior Bandido appeared at the gate.

  ‘Who the fuck are you lot?’

  ‘We’re the Midland Outlaws from England,’ said Boone.

  ‘Never heard of you.’

  ‘We’re still quite new. We were all different clubs and we came together last year.’

  ‘Ah yes, I remember hearing something about that. But what makes you think you can come here?’

  ‘Well Rainer from the Montreal AOA said he had arranged our invitation.’

  The Bandido shook his head. ‘No he didn’t. So far as I can see, you don’t have an invitation.’

  ‘Then someone must have messed up. Is Rainer here?’

  ‘No. There’s no one from the AOA here. No one at all. Except you lot.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not part of the AOA.’

  ‘You’re not affiliated to them, even though your patches say Outlaws?’

  ‘Well we’re all outlaw clubs aren’t we?’ replied Boone. ‘But we’re independent. We don’t answer to anyone.’

  What Rainer had failed to explain was that at the time he made the call to the Midland Outlaws, relations between the AOA and the Bandidos were going through a period of extreme strain. Rainer had been invited to the party himself but suspected it might be a massive set-up and that he and the other Outlaws would be walking straight into a trap. In order to test the water, he had sent Boone and co in his place.

  Luckily for the Brits, the Bandidos quickly read between the lines and realised what was going on. The fact that they were not affiliated to the AOA also worked greatly in their favour. The organisers allowed the Midland Outlaws to attend the gathering and offered them a level of hospitality appropriate to a fellow MC, but remained extremely wary of them throughout.

  All around the circuit, more than 5,000 bikers from all over the world had gathered for a weekend of racing and partying. As well as the Bandidos there were dozens of smaller, fiercely independent clubs like the Bones MC from Germany, the 666 Undertakers from Denmark and the Morbids MC fr
om Sweden, many of whom had a long and proud history of their own.

  Perhaps the most glamorous contingent came in the form of the Desperados Harley Davidson Club, led by its lifetime president, Johnny Hallyday (aka the French Elvis Presley). An icon in France, Hallyday has sold more than one hundred million albums throughout his career, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show (with the Jimi Hendrix Experience as his support act) and collaborated with everyone from Peter Frampton to Bono. He had always dreamt of being a biker but unable to commit enough to join an established MC, he decided to form his own – the Desperados, who also doubled as his personal security entourage.

  The Midland Outlaws found Hallyday a real laugh and loved hanging out with him. The fact that he was not seen as a threat to the Bandidos also helped ease the tension that Boone and the others were feeling. Their every move was being watched, with several Bandido prospects charged with keeping a close eye on who they were talking to and what they were getting up to. Boone couldn’t help but make a game of it, trying his best to lose the men who were tailing him.

  Although Boone did his best to mingle, the language barrier soon became a problem. But then he noticed that when the French, German and Danes were talking to one another, they used a form of broken English. ‘Hell, I can do that,’ thought Boone and within a matter of minutes he and the rest of the Midland Outlaws were drinking and partying with clubs from around the world as if they’d known them all their lives.

  In particular, the Brits found themselves bonding with the Undertakers and the Morbids, both of whom seemed to share the same spirit of adventure and determination to survive as independent MCs in a world increasingly dominated by the global biker brands. Boone felt particularly drawn to Michael ‘Joe’ Ljunggren, an officer with the Morbids and a true kindred spirit. ‘Good morals, good principles,’ he told friends later, ‘a real diamond geezer. He’s just like one of us. Totally sound.’