Enforcer (14 page)

I was filthy. The club had voted for talks, and he’d gone off in secret to do this.

‘What are you gunna do?’ I asked him. ‘Just blow up the clubhouse with ’em all in it?’

‘That’s the idea,’ Kraut piped up.

‘I’m not fuckin’ talking to you, prick.’

‘The Rebels are gettin’ too big for their boots,’ Jock argued. ‘And the Angels will be next.’

‘Fuck me roan. D’ya wanna be the only club in Australia?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh jeez, that’d be great fun, wouldn’t it.’ To me, a big part of being in the club was the dynamic that existed between the various clubs. Not being at war with them, but knowing that if you rode through someone’s territory, you might end up with eight or nine bikes chasing you down the road. You’d have to pull over and there’d be an all-in blue. I liked that tension. Often if I had nothing to do I’d pick out some club and spend half an hour riding round their area, or past their clubhouse. Sometimes I ended up in blues, other times I just rode home. But when Jock turned round and said that he wanted to be the only club in Australia, that’s when I knew we were in for big troubles. Because it would go from the Warlocks to the Rebels, to the Angels, to whoever was next on his list.

I
ROCKED
up to the clubhouse one Saturday night and there was Kraut out the front, on his Triumph, with three nominees propping him up. I couldn’t work out what was going on so I watched them for a while and couldn’t believe what I was seeing: the nominees were literally pushing Kraut around the block. Kraut, a nominee himself, still couldn’t ride.

Junior was standing there too, and he seemed really upset. You didn’t see Junior mad often, he was a quiet bloke, so I asked him what was wrong.

‘They’ve just given Kraut his colours,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Jock and Sheepskin.’

‘They can’t do that. It’s not even meeting night. You need a hundred per cent vote to patch someone. Fuck, the bloke can’t even ride.’

I went inside and asked Jock what was going on.

‘Kraut’s been given his colours,’ he said.

‘Whaddya mean Kraut’s been given his fuckin’ colours?’

‘We’ve just voted on it and he’ll be patched at the next meeting.’

‘You’re fuckin’ kiddin’. You’re supposed to wait till a meeting to vote on colours.’

‘Well as president I have the right to call a meeting whenever I want.’

‘Yeah, but there’s s’posed to be a hundred per cent attendance.’

‘Well the members who were here tonight decided to overrule that and give him his colours.’

‘Which members?’ I asked, looking into the small shag room off the main area. Standing in there was Jock’s Strike Force. They were the ones who’d voted for Kraut to get his colours. ‘What about Junior?’ I asked. ‘Junior was here. Did he vote?’

‘Junior wasn’t in the room.’

Junior butted in: ‘I told you, Jock, that Kraut wasn’t to get his colours.’ It was the first time I’d ever seen Junior stand up to Jock.

‘I don’t care what you fuckin’ say,’ said Jock. ‘Kraut’s got his colours.’

Sheepskin was standing there but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. I just walked out and said, ‘You gotta be fuckin’ jokin’.’

Kraut was patched at the next meeting. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Normally when a bloke got his colours it was a big party and you had every bloke in the club congratulating the new member. It was a real brotherhood thing. But the only blokes that went near Kraut that night were the Strike Force. The rest of the club didn’t want nothing to do with him.

Kraut spent the next month learning to ride his Triumph without someone holding on to him before he was allowed to ride with the club. And on his first run with us, we only made it a couple of kilometres from the clubhouse before he came off and brought down nearly half the pack. Luckily there was only minor damage to a couple of bikes, but I think even Jock was sorry then that he’d given Kraut his colours. On the ride home I pulled him out of the pack and made him ride a hundred yards behind the rest of us. He was just too dangerous.

Kraut was told that he couldn’t ride in the pack for at least two months, during which time he had to practise hard. At the end of the two months, Sheepskin and I took him for a test ride down the road. He seemed to handle it so we agreed he could rejoin the pack, but he still had to ride at the back.

N
O ONE
outside the Strike Force was happy about how Kraut got his colours. It really split the club. One night Snoddy was over at my place for tea and we were yakking on about how much the club was changing.

‘We’ve gotten to be the biggest club in Sydney,’ Snoddy said. ‘We’ve got some really top blokes. We should be stoked. But there are some real dodgy blokes who’ve slipped through the cracks, too.’

‘It’s Jock’s attitude,’ I said. ‘Wanting to go to war with other clubs, and the whole Strike Force. The way he turns people in the club against each other. It’s like he only wants to keep people in small groups.’

‘Whaddya mean?’ Snoddy asked.

‘I’ve heard him telling Bushy that Sheepskin hates him and then heard him telling Sheepskin that Bushy hates him. The whole thing. I’ve heard him tell Animal how Chop hates him, then turn around and tell Chop that Animal hates him.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. That’s how he tries to stay in control, keep everyone in little cliques.’

‘Yeah, but it’s ruining the club. What about the brotherhood?’

‘Y’know,’ Snoddy said, ‘this isn’t the first time this has happened.’

‘Whaddya mean?’

Snoddy told me there’d been two previous splits in the Comancheros, the last one just a year before I’d joined. He said a bunch of members, led by the former vice-president and sergeant, had left after falling out with Jock.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

Snoddy said the whole thing started after the former vice-president came up with the innocuous idea of the club holding bike shows. A lot of blokes, including Snoddy, liked the idea, but Jock and his cohort shot it down. With the ute-driving Foghorn and Snowy in his ear, Jock decided to flex his presidential muscle and put an end to the debate by banning bike shows altogether. After that, the vice-president, sergeant and a bunch of other members just left the club.

I’d heard about the former vice-president and sergeant from Jock previously; his version was that they were fuckwits. Especially the former sergeant, a fella by the name of Branko. I remembered one particular story Jock had told me about a night out with the club at some dance in Wentworthville. Jock claimed that this big bouncer had put it on Branko and that Jock had come to Branko’s rescue and flattened the bouncer. I told Snoddy the story.

‘Have you ever seen Branko?’ asked Snoddy.

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t need anyone to look after him. That’s just Jock bullshitting.’

Jock had also warned me that since I’d joined the club, Branko had been going round saying he was going to kick the shit out of me. I asked Snoddy if he knew anything about it.

‘Dunno about that,’ Snoddy said. ‘I thought they were good blokes.’

I decided to test just how much of Jock was bullshit. Some time later I tracked Branko down and fronted him. Soon as he realised who I was he wanted to know, ‘Whaddya got against me?’

‘You’re the one who’s been running round mouthing off about me,’ I said.

‘No I haven’t,’ he said, before it dawned on him. ‘Hang on, did Jock tell ya that?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied.

‘Right, you got twenty minutes?’

‘Yeah.’

We sat down and he told me about the split in the club; how five or six blokes had just walked out because of Jock. He warned me, ‘Don’t believe anything he says to ya.’

He said that the incident at Wentworthville had really gone down with Jock getting belted by the big bouncer. Branko, a fair-sized bloke as Snoddy had said, went over and dropped the bouncer. But by the time they got back to the clubhouse it was Jock who’d rescued Branko rather than the other way round. And that’s how the story was told from then on. Which, needless to say, Branko didn’t appreciate.

I
N EARLY 1982
, Snoddy and another member, Charlie, went over to the United States to buy some cheap Harleys. Snoddy had arranged with some friends from the Hells Angels that some of their American brothers would meet them at the airport when they arrived in California, then show them around and help them to buy some bikes. But when Snoddy and Charlie turned up in Los Angeles there were no Angels there to meet them. So instead they forked out $400 for an old Dodge and headed off across the States. They ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at a motorcycle shop called Crazy Larry’s, where they got talking to some of the local outlaw bikers from a club called the Bandidos. They were one of the biggest outlaw bike clubs in America. When the Bandidos found out Snoddy and Charlie were from Australia they invited them to a local bar to drink with them. The rest of the Albuquerque Bandidos rocked in, including the president, Ha Ha Chuck. They got talking to him and ended up staying at his place for a few days. Ha Ha arranged for some bikes to be brought up from other chapters of the Bandidos, and Snoddy and Charlie had them shipped back to Australia.

When Snoddy got home he couldn’t stop talking about the Bandidos and the way they operated. Snoddy said the Bandidos ran things so differently to Jock’s military unit. The Bandidos were like an outlaw club was supposed to be. It was old school: honour and loyalty and having a good time with your brothers. Basically a bunch of blokes getting on their bikes, going out and partying. Everywhere there was one Bandido, there’d be another half a dozen Bandidos. According to Snoddy they were like a family. His stories struck a chord with me because that’s what I wanted the Comancheros to be. One big family that partied together and looked after each other. Not going out playing toy soldiers.

The rest of the blokes (barring the Strike Force, of course) were as rapt as I was. It pissed Jock off something fierce, because he reckoned the way he ran the Comancheros was the only way to run a club. Snoddy even told Jock, ‘If we’d been Bandidos, Kraut would never have got his colours.’

There wasn’t a lot we could do to change Jock’s style, but one thing we did do in admiration of the Bandidos was stop calling our nominees ‘nominees’. The Bandidos called their blokes ‘prospects’, so we started doing that too. Jock hated it, but I thought it sounded better, and as I was in charge of the prospects at the time, I made an executive decision.

It was only a small step, but it would prove to be a significant one. And I think it dawned on Jock then that things were starting to change.

O
n 7 February 1982, my mate John Boy, who’d first brought me into the Comancheros, was riding up Woodville Road with Bushy, heading towards Merrylands. He was making a right-hand turn at a green arrow when a car coming in the opposite direction ran the red and hit John Boy dead on. He didn’t stand a chance. Any club tension was put aside while we mourned the loss of a good brother and organised his funeral.

It was a traditional club funeral. On the day, we draped John Boy’s coffin in a Comancheros banner and placed it on a customised sidecar. Then we began the slow procession up the F3 to Palmdale Lawn Cemetery north of Gosford on the central coast, where we buried our members. There were Comanchero bikes in front of his coffin and Comanchero bikes behind. The old ladies followed in cars, along with more bikes ridden by some Hells Angels and independents who’d known John Boy.

Then there were more cars carrying friends of the club.

At John Boy’s graveside, seven members lined up with shotguns which they fired into the air, in the traditional Comanchero seven-gun salute. It made the TV news.

On his headstone we inscribed the words:
MAY HE RIDE HIS KNUCKLE FOREVER
.

N
OT LONG
after we lost John Boy, I was up the Cross when I got into a punch-up with a bunch of heavies. A gun came out and I got shot in the side. The bullet hit my hip and embedded itself in my stomach.

I was bleeding heavily so Donna ripped off this soft top she was wearing and whacked it in there to stem the bleeding. All the way home to Ashfield on the bike she was pressing it into the wound. We only just made it.

Back home, Donna got out the scalpel and the tweezers, then started feeling round for the slug. She stuck a probe in the wound but couldn’t feel anything so started squeezing and prodding around the rest of my stomach. She reckoned she could feel something on the left, four or five inches above where the slug had actually entered.

We decided to give it a go, so she made a cut straight over where she thought she could feel the bullet. She burrowed down a couple of inches and there was the slug. She used the tweezers to pull it out. Then she cleaned everything out and stitched me up. Never got infected. I don’t think I even missed the next meeting. I just drove the car instead of riding the bike.

***

S
HADOW,
S
NODDY
and I were spending a fair bit of time together during the week, so we had a lot of opportunity to yak on. Snoddy told us about his mate Leroy, who he’d known for years, and who he really wanted to get into the club. The problem, as Snoddy told it, was that Leroy used to hang round the Comos before I joined, and for some reason Foghorn and Snowy didn’t like him and had given him the boot.