Enforcer (12 page)

‘What were their names again?’ asked the copper.

‘Spider and Monk.’

‘And they’ve gone, have they?’

‘Yeah, but if I hear anything about ’em, what’s your name?’

He gave me his name and said, ‘I’m down at Central.’

‘Well I’ll give you a ring.’

‘Fair enough.’ He smirked and rounded up his blokes. I sent mine back into the pub.

Half an hour later about eighty taxis pulled up down the road at the Edinburgh Hotel, which you could see from the Terminus. All these drivers got out of their cabs and were milling around. Jock was saying, ‘Let’s go down and kill ’em.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’ll go down and talk to ’em.’

‘You’ll get killed.’

‘No I won’t.’

So I walked down the middle of the road towards them. And back in them days I had this strut about me, because I didn’t care about anyone. I had it in my head that if I was going to get beat up I was going to get beat up. My old man had always said that no matter how good you were there was always someone better out there, it just depended on how long it took you to run into them. But so far I hadn’t found the bloke.

So this night I was strutting towards the taxi drivers, but as I got closer they all started jumping in their cabs, banging into each other trying to get away. I wasn’t going to get beat up that night.

The funny thing about that was, the next Friday night, me, Shadow and Chop went into the Edinburgh Hotel to meet a couple of sheilas Chop knew. We were yakking on when one of the sheilas said, ‘I was here last Saturday night and there was all these cabs pulled up out the front and this huge bikie come walkin’ down the street. He kept comin’ and comin’. He was the biggest, meanest, ugliest-lookin’ thing you’ve ever seen.’

Chop turned around and slapped her. ‘That’s my brother you’re talkin’ about.’

I just thought it was funny. When I told Donna what the sheila said, she thought biggest and meanest sounded right, but not ugliest.

B
Y 1981
I was still considered one of the biggest and meanest in the underground fight scene, too, but after forty-three fights, and at thirty-five years of age, I was almost done. I was getting to the point where I was liking getting hit, and I was dropping my guard. I knew that it was time to stop before I ended up getting knocked on my arse.

Fight number forty-four, my last, also turned out to be my toughest. I rode up to the designated venue, the dilapidated Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo, in my jeans and leather jacket only to see my opponent arrive in a limo. It turned out he was a German merchant seaman called Wolfgang Gertz who’d fought in America, undefeated, making big dollars.

I changed into my black tracksuit pants and T-shirt. Unusually, I was wearing joggers because we were fighting on an old wooden floor where you’d pick up splinters real easy.

We stood looking at each other while a bloke stood between us holding a hanky in the air. All the suits, socialites and knockabouts crowded in around the edge of the rope circle. The hanky hit the ground and we were into it.

Gertz hit me with some beauties. I hadn’t been hit like that before. Just for a second I thought, Ooh, I might have met the bloke to beat me here. But then I thought, No you haven’t. And I started getting back into him. I smashed his nose from one side of his face to the other, then he got me a corker in the eye, cracked my ribs. It was an epic fight, lasting maybe seven minutes. I could have gone on, but I could see that he was fucked. He was covered in blood, his eyebrow was hanging down. I finished him off by breaking his arm and hitting him in the throat.

My top lip was split wide open, I had a lump the size of a goose egg on the side of my head, one eye was swollen shut and my ribs felt like they’d been hit with a sledgehammer.

Shadow was helping clean me up when he noticed that all of Gertz’s mates had taken off, leaving him there on his own bleeding all over the wharf.

‘Let’s help him over to the pub,’ Shadow said.

We picked him up and took him across to the Rock’n’Roll. Blood was dripping off me into my schooner of lemon squash. Whatever Gertz was drinking had turned red. We took him up to the hospital, after which me and Wolfy became really good mates.

I’d had forty-four fights, won them all and made a lot of money for both me and my employer. The underground fight scene exists to this day, but for me, it was over. As for my extracurricular activities after that, well, let’s just say my boss kept me in the holiday business. People who upset him were taken for long trips.

And there was always another street blue right around the corner.

M
UM PHONED
up one night to say Chop was in St Vincent’s Hospital at Darlinghurst. I went screaming into town on the bike, pulled up at Mum’s house up the Cross and asked her what had happened. She said she didn’t know, but that two of my sisters were at the hospital now. I rode straight there and found the casualty department.

There was Chop, the side of his face swollen like an overgrown tomato.

‘What happened?’

‘I was up the Manzil Room and one of the bouncers there – you know that big Maori they call Grizzly? – he king-hit me while I was sitting at the bar.’

‘Righto,’ I said, ‘leave it to me. D’ya know how long you’re gunna be in here for?’

One of the doctors came over and said it’d be two or three days. ‘We have to fix up his cheekbone.’

I went home and filled Donna in on what had happened. ‘We’re going back up the Cross tomorrow night,’ I said.

So the next night me and Donna went up to the Manzil Room. I waited outside while she went in and checked out the club. This Grizzly was pretty well known round the Cross. ‘Yeah,’ she reported back, ‘he’s in there.’

I waited for him. Eventually he came out and started walking down the adjacent lane. I walked up behind him and let him have it right in the back of the head, the same way he’d king-hit Chop. He went down and I put the boot in, and I mean I really stomped him. Then I pulled out the buck knife, and while he was lying there, blood pissing out his ears, I took the little finger off his right hand.

As I was walking back to the bike a few of his mates came out of the club. ‘You’re fucked.’

‘You wanna try it right now, cunts? Let’s go.’

‘No, no. We don’t want no trouble. We know who you are.’

‘Yeah, well when your cocksucking mate comes round tell him that was from Chop. And not to forget it.’

I went back to where Donna was standing with the bike, holding her purse. On nights like this she always had a friend of mine in it, covering my back. Donna was better than having half a dozen blokes with you. You knew you could trust her and she’d never take off, never put you in it. It was like having your wife and your best friend all rolled into one.

***

T
HE
C
OMANCHEROS
had grown to over thirty-five members, which in those days made it a big club. Combined with our physical strength, it meant we also had a big reputation. Which only made us more of a target for idiots. You went for a quiet drink and ran into a bunch of dopes who always seemed to think that if they could get over the top of a few outlaw bikers it made them super tough.

This Saturday night we’d gone for a ride with our old ladies over to the Bridge Hotel on Victoria Road, Rozelle. We’d been there for a couple of hours and there was some bloke there with a handful of his mates spouting off that he was the local heavy. I could see what was coming, but before I could get round the other side of the bar to get rid of him a fight broke out. Naturally all the locals joined in, and some of them were pretty heavy-looking. Our bloke, Roger, was right in the middle of it, and one thing I’ll give Roger is he’ll always have a go.

One Comanchero in, all Comancheros in
. So the whole club was charging round trying to get to these idiots. Some climbed the bar and dived onto these six or seven blokes. We didn’t even hear the pop. Someone just turned round and said, ‘That bloke’s got a gun.’ And there was this bloke standing there with a gun. One of our blokes grabbed it off him, and we finished kicking the shit out of them. When we were done we got out the front, and I made sure there was no one left inside. Got everyone on their bikes and we left.

We made it as far as Great North Road, heading back towards Five Dock, when I heard someone yelling, ‘Pull over! Pull over!’ I pulled the pack over and Roger hopped off his bike. He put his hand inside his deck and said, ‘I’m bleeding.’ Donna, who was a nurse, had a look at it, then me and Sheepskin had a squiz. There was a small hole in his chest on the right-hand side. He’d been shot.

We went back to our place and got Roger on the bed. Sheepskin decided that he was going to play surgeon. He got out some of Donna’s nursing gear and was setting up, with Roger yelling out, ‘I wanna doctor!’ We decided to give the woman a go instead, but when she’d had a proper look she said, ‘No, it’s too far in. It’ll only cause more damage.’ So we took Roger up to Western Suburbs Hospital and they took him in to be operated on.

The next morning when I got up there to visit him, Roger said, ‘Have a look at this,’ and lifted up his gown to show me this dirty great wound, a massive curve of stitches that went all the way from his hip, around his back, and up to his chest. It looked like he’d been bitten by a white pointer, and all from one little .22 slug.

A
S MUCH
as we enjoyed our growing size and reputation, the downside of a big club was that we were starting to lose some of the tightness. Once a club gets big, there are some blokes you hardly even know, and the club fractures into different alliances. This was what started to happen to us, aided in no small part by Jock, who had a habit of encouraging division among members. We still operated as a whole, because we all respected the colours that joined us, but you could see the different groups that were forming. Jock had Snowy and Foghorn and a few other allies, while I was tight with my brothers, the McElwaines, and blokes like Davo, Roach and Snoddy.

My brothers and I all wore a Campbell ring, a silver shield with a boar’s head in the middle, with Campbell written across the top and the wearer’s name engraved along the bottom. In 1981, we decided to start a tradition of giving rings to some of our ‘brothers’ outside the family, to make them honorary Campbells. We had a vote on it and decided the first person to receive a Campbell ring would be Roach.

It was a bit of a funny choice, I suppose, because he wasn’t the best fighter going round (even though he thought he was). But he was real staunch. He would never leave you. And to me, that’s the toughest sort of bloke.

Snoddy was next up for a Campbell ring. Snoddy had become like family, especially to me and Shadow. He was always round our place. He didn’t have his own family. There were stories around about him being an orphan and worse, but I’d seen him close down when other people asked him about it, so I just never asked. I figured if Snoddy wanted to tell me his life story he would.

I wanted to give a Campbell ring to another of our members, Animal, who was tough and staunch and a good bloke, but Jock had gotten into Chop’s ear, trying to create divisions the way he did. So Chop vetoed that ring.

Some time later we gave rings to Dukes, Gloves and Knuckles McElwaine. I would have liked to have given Sheepskin one too, but even though we were very good friends, he remained in Jock’s camp, so I just couldn’t do it. As for Jock, it always pissed him off that he never got a Campbell ring.

One of the youngest blokes in the club, Junior, was another fella who had my respect. He was one of the best members you could have. As a nominee he was always the first up, collecting the firewood on a run or standing his bike watch, and it was the same when he became a member. He would do anything for you. He was a good mechanic and if someone’s bike broke down Junior would work on it. He was also one of the best cartoonists and painters you’ve seen, and was always doing caricatures of the other fellas.

He was a big strong bloke but one thing about Junior was that he could not fight. He was just like Roach, staunch as, but dead set couldn’t throw a punch to save himself. So he asked me to teach him.

He started coming to the gym with me to train. I put the gloves on him and tried to teach him to box. He couldn’t box. I tried to teach him kickboxing. He couldn’t kick. I tried to teach him Muay Thai, judo. He was hopeless. But I’d been in fights where there’d been six, seven, sometimes nine blokes, and the only person with me was Junior. At the end of the fight, I’d have decked most of the blokes, some would have run off, but Junior would still be standing there with his black eyes and a split lip. He was little more than a punching bag but he would never leave me. And I value that more than any flashy fighter.

We certainly had plenty of good men but then there were the others.

***

K
RAUT FIRST
rocked up to the club in his Holden Commodore with customised numberplates that read
SS
. The plates went with the Nazi swastika armbands and replica ring he wore, and the SS dagger he carried. He was all in black, his pants tucked into his heavy black boots like the Gestapo, with a matching cap. As I watched him walking towards the clubhouse, old war movies were flashing through my brain. I thought, Oh, you gotta be kidding.