Enforcer (6 page)

Mum said, ‘I know what youse boys are up to. One of these girls is for Shadow, isn’t she?’

‘They might all be for Shadow, Mum.’

We hid them in a bedroom awaiting Shadow’s return.

Shadow walked in the door and first thing he did was go up to Mum and give her a big cuddle and a kiss on each cheek. Then he sat down on the lounge with her to have a catch-up, his arm around Mum. Everyone in our family thinks the world of our mum. All us brothers would die for her. She’s a remarkable woman.

Mum and Shadow spent half an hour or so together, but Mum knew we had these three sheilas in the house, so we finally brought them out and said to Shadow, ‘Take your pick – or take all of ’em.’

He walked along the line, spotted Joanne and took her off into the bedroom. After that it was on. They were always together. She became his old lady and they went on to have a couple of kids together.

S
HADOW MIGHT
have had things sorted, but things were a lot more complicated for me where women were concerned.

I was sitting in my booth at the Illinois Hotel at Five Dock – the last booth on the left as you walked into the lounge. My back to the corner. Anywhere I went – the pub, someone else’s clubhouse, even my own clubhouse – I always sat with my back into the corner so no one could walk up behind me.

This sheila come up to me and said, ‘Nice bike out there.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Would you like to take me for a ride?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘If you take me for a ride we can go back to me flat and I’ll give you a fuck.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well you’re gunna regret this.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I know Caesar from the Gladiators. He’s a really good friend of mine, and I’m gunna get him to punch your head in.’

I was taken aback for a moment. ‘Really?’

‘Yep.’

‘Just how well do you know Caesar from the Gladiators?’ I asked her.

‘Real well. We used to go out together.’

‘Well if you know him that well, you should know who I am.’

She looked at me with a blank look and, in the pause, the old barmaid Gladys came trotting over. ‘Caesar, there’s a phone call for you.’

This sheila looked at me, went bright red, and
whooshka
, was out the door. Old Gladys chuckled, ‘I thought you mighta needed a hand.’

Bikers get a lot of women chasing them. When you pull up at a pub, you’ve got women. When the pub closes, you have sheilas lining up outside. The blokes get on their bikes, point to one of the sheilas, then point to the back of the bike. The sheila trots over and hops on.

Of course I was married, but there was nothing between me and Irene; I really only went home to see the kids. And as it turned out, Irene didn’t respect the marriage at all. Around this time I found out she’d been playing up on me with three different men.

I told Irene that as far as I was concerned the marriage was over, and that if I ever caught her cheating on me again I’d give her a real good hiding. For a while I took out this real stunner, Cheree, but I stayed with Irene. I figured that while the kids were young it was my place to be there for them, and I was.

Well Irene was one of these sheilas that just wouldn’t listen. She thought more of going out with these blokes than she did of her kids and me, and before long there was a fourth bloke.

I ended up in court when the bloke turned up in hospital and had to have his spleen removed. He reckoned I’d attacked him and the coppers had a couple of witnesses to say that I did. Fortunately the witnesses changed their minds, and then for some reason when the arresting officer took the stand he came up with a new angle: ‘On the same day of the alleged assault, the victim was up on the roof of his house cleaning gutters and fell off his roof.’

So they called the doctor back up and the judge quizzed him. ‘You’ve said that the only way this spleen could have been injured was by being kicked in the stomach. Would falling off a roof have caused the same damage?’

The doctor looked at me, then turned to the judge and said, ‘Yes, your honour, falling off a roof could definitely cause the spleen to rupture.’

The judge found the charge proven but recorded no conviction. It was the only time I’d ever been to court, and I kept my record clean.

Outside the court the copper came up to me and told me that one of his best mates in the force had the same thing happen to him; his missus had played up with a couple of blokes behind his back. He said, ‘I thought you deserved a fair shake.’ So there are some decent coppers out there. We shook hands and I returned to the unhappiness of the marital home.

A
T THE
beginning of May 1978, I was at the Croydon pub, nursing an orange juice and enjoying the spectacle of two good sorts playing pool. One of the sheilas lost the game with all seven balls still on the table, which according to house rules meant she had to flash her tits. So she got up on the table and took her top off. She had big tits, too. But it was the other sheila who’d really caught my eye. As soon as I saw the slender blonde bending over the table, everything stood up. I went as stiff as a board. I knew then that I’d be with her one day. If I hadn’t been married I’d have been straight over and asking her out. As it was I had to settle with buying her a drink and talking into the night. Her name was Donna and she was a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old nurse who worked at Camperdown Children’s Hospital.

About a week later Irene met Donna, and went out of her way to make sure they became girlfriends. She invited Donna to the movies, made sure she came over for tea. Donna started spending more and more time with our family, until one day Irene suggested that she move in with us.

I was a bit taken aback. ‘We don’t have the room,’ I said.

‘Well she can sleep in with us,’ Irene said.

So Donna moved in and night after night the three of us would crawl into bed together. Nothing happened, but it was becoming more and more obvious that Irene was trying to push me and Donna together. Irene would sleep on the edge of the bed and more or less turn her back and nudge me towards Donna. Not that she needed to push too hard. It was taking all the strength I had to resist. Maybe Irene was trying to ease her own conscience. Or maybe she thought if I was interested in Donna I wouldn’t be watching her so closely and she could play up as much as she liked.

For a long while Donna and I just talked, and we really clicked. I’d never had that with anyone else before. Neither had she. She’d been living with her mum and dad and had only been with three men before. Very quickly she became my best friend, and a few months later, my lover. Once that happened, there was no going back. I knew I’d found the one I wanted to spend the rest of me life with. I could trust Donna, I’d take a bullet for her in a heartbeat. She was loyal, loving, passionate and, above all, truthful. And of course, she was mind-blowingly sexy. But even if we could never have sex again, that wouldn’t have changed our relationship. I’d love her just as much. Simply having Donna sitting in the same room gave me pleasure and comfort.

Once it became clear how serious things were between us I said to Donna, ‘You wanna think this right through, because being the old lady and wife of an outlaw biker isn’t an easy thing, and especially with me. There’s a lot of people out there who, for some unknown reason, figure that the way to prove themselves or get a reputation is to either beat me up or take me out. There’ll be good times, but there’ll be a lotta hard times.’

And the woman said, ‘Well I wanna be with you, and the one thing I want is to be your wife.’

I promised Donna that one day we’d get hitched.

Of course Irene was still in the picture, and with the three of us living under one roof, it amazed some people that I had two ‘wives’. They didn’t know that my marriage to Irene was dead, and that if Donna hadn’t come along and I’d stayed with Irene I probably would’ve ended up killing her. Or at least waited until the kids got a bit older and then left with whichever kids wanted to come with me. Now that things had changed it was time for Donna and I to move out on our own. We got a little place together, and each afternoon I’d go and visit the kids when they got home from school. Then I’d be home by seven for tea with Donna.

A
LOT
of people think that bikers don’t look after their old ladies, but nothing could be further from the truth. I reckon we look after our old ladies better than the normal straight bloke does.

Soon after Donna and I got together, I heard that the sergeant-at-arms of the Phoenix had said a few things about her that he shouldn’t have. The Phoenix was drinking in at the Bat and Ball on Cleveland Street, Redfern, so I went in there one night with Donna and fronted the head blokes. It turned out the sergeant wasn’t there but me and the other blokes had words. One of them said to me, ‘You know we could stomp ya.’

‘Okay, go ahead and try.’ There were about twenty of them counting their hangers-on, and I had a cracked arm at the time, but I still outnumbered them. After about ten minutes every one of those blokes wearing a Phoenix patch had apologised to Donna. They even told me where their sergeant was. Turns out he was in Canterbury Hospital with a busted leg.

Next day, I headed over to Canterbury Hospital and found the ward this bloke was in. As soon as I walked in he started up: ‘I know what you’re here for, but I didn’t say it. It’s just people trying to get me in trouble.’

By the time I left, his leg would’ve been a lot sorer, and it wasn’t the only thing that was broken. He would have had a lot of trouble breathing through his nose, too.

No one speaks disrespectfully of my old lady.

A
n outlaw club called the Assassins had started up in Summer Hill, one suburb to the east of our territory, and before long they were prancing around in our terrain.

We had a meeting and decided that we’d front them at their pub and give them the chance to move out of our area. If they didn’t go along with it, we’d take their colours and close them down then and there.

So we headed over to the Summer Hill Hotel. There were about fifteen bikes out the front so we knew there was a fair few of them inside, against seven of us. We went into the old tiled pub and found the Assassins’ president at the long front bar. We told him what the go was. He went away and had a word with some of his blokes, then came back and said, ‘We’ll think about it.’

That wasn’t the answer we’d been looking for. I looked at Bull, he looked at Snake, and
bang
, it was on. I threw the first punch right at their president. We chased them round the pub. Chop latched onto their sergeant-at-arms with his teeth and had hold of him by the side of the face. Some of them were using chairs to try and hold us off, some had jumped over the bar. When you get into an all-in blue, you pick up the closest thing, whether it be a glass or a chair or a pool cue, and do whatever you have to do to win. If you’re a real outlaw biker, you’re not doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for your club and the blokes that are with you. In a really staunch club, the blokes are that tight, they’d rather cop a hit than let their brother standing alongside them cop it.

It lasted about eight or nine minutes. We knocked them all down and as each of them went down Schultz came along behind us and took their colours. And that was the end of the Assassins.

That sort of thing happened quite a lot – clubs closing down other clubs. Usually it would be an all-in brawl, but sometimes there wasn’t even a fight. In one incident at Granville, one club just walked into another club’s pub, fronted the president and told him to get his blokes to drop their colours. And they did. Just dropped their colours without a punch being thrown, from what I was told. They’d obviously sussed out the other club and decided they weren’t going to match up. But to me, if I had a bloke in my club hand over his colours instead of copping a kicking, he’d be gone. He’d be out of the club and
I’d
give him the kicking.

Another decent-sized club, Salem’s Witches, who had the area between Summer Hill and Dulwich Hill for a couple of years, one day just disappeared off the scene. They were there one minute and gone the next. No more Salem’s Witches. Same with the Phantom Lords. They were pretty well known, but same thing. One day they just disappeared.

W
E WERE
out one night in the southern suburbs looking to even up with some blokes who’d been into Bull. We couldn’t find them so were heading home to Ashfield when we stopped at a set of lights and Bull said, ‘Next pub we come to we’ll go in for a beer.’ So coming off Tom Ugly’s Bridge at Blakehurst, we turned into the Seabreeze Hotel.

As we pulled in I could see another lot of bikes belonging to a club called the Hangmen in the car park. Oh shit, I thought. My brothers didn’t go out looking for fights, but they wouldn’t back away from one if you paid them. And it didn’t take much to stir them up, especially if it involved another club. All you had to do was stare at Snake and it’d be on.

We went into the pub and the blokes ordered their beers. I got my lemon squash. I never got on the piss. One of the Hangmen came over and said, ‘We drink here.’

Shadow came round from the back and said, ‘Yeah, so what?’