Enforcer (9 page)

M
OST
C
OMANCHERO
nominees had to serve a nine-month minimum to get their colours, but I was patched after six and a half months. The next day, Jock phoned me up and asked me to come round to his place at Pennant Hills.

I put on my brand-new set of black and gold colours with the image of the condor and a broken wagon wheel, and rode out to the Hills district. Jock’s old lady Vanessa brought me a glass of Coke. Aside from running the club, Jock owned a truck and a fencing business, which must have been doing well, judging from the size of his house.

Me and Jock were sitting down talking about the club for a while before he got to his point.

‘Is there any chance,’ he asked, ‘of getting your brothers into the club?’ Suddenly, I could see why I’d been given an easy ride. Jock wanted the fighting power of the Campbells.

‘You might get a couple of ’em,’ I said. My brothers had recently closed down the Gladiators and were riding together as independents.

‘I don’t want a couple,’ he said. ‘I want all your brothers. I want to have all the Campbells in the Comancheros.’

I went and spoke to Bull, Shadow, Wack, Chop, Snake and Wheels. ‘Jock told me he wants you all in the club. He said youse’ll have a sweet run through.’ Meaning that, like me, their nominee time would be short and easy.

Shadow was the first to agree, then Bull. Once they’d come over, Wack and Chop followed. Snake was a bit harder to convince. He didn’t want to be a nominee. So I had a word with Jock and Jock said, ‘You tell Snake that all he’s gotta do is turn up on club nights and meeting nights. The rest of the time is his.’ It wasn’t, strictly speaking, within the rules. Pushing a nominee through like that would have got up the noses of other members. But Jock was president and he seemed to do whatever he wanted.

I passed Jock’s offer on to Snake and it suited him. He agreed to come over to the Comancheros. The only brother who wouldn’t come was Wheels. He just didn’t like Jock.

The night the rest of my brothers were patched, Jock had the biggest grin on his face. He’d got what he wanted. Jock knew that having my five brothers in the club was like getting fifty more blokes. They were staunch, and they would do anything to win a fight. The power and reputation of the Campbell brothers suddenly added a whole lot of weight to the Comancheros.

J
OCK
R
OSS
was a military man. Even before I joined the Comancheros I’d heard stories of his obsession with war, how he ran the club like an army. His favourite topics of conversation were his time with the SAS and the strategies of leaders like Napoleon and Genghis Khan. The way he’d recruited my brothers was in line with all that. He was building up his own army, and he wanted warriors. As a Scotsman he was well aware of the Campbells’ fame as highland warriors.

Jock’s military focus was evident in the club rules. There were fourteen rules in the Comanchero charter, which was pretty standard, but within those rules were a whopping fifty or sixty by-laws. All of them written by Jock. And some of them were pretty strange. Like the ban on associating with members of other clubs. Jock’s reason for that was that if there was ever a war with a club that you had friends in, you might not be able to bash them or, if he gave the order, kill them. I had plenty of friends in different clubs so that was one rule I didn’t plan on keeping.

The other peculiar thing about Jock was that he wasn’t much into his bike. In fact, he had night blindness, so me and another member had to ride either side of him and tell him when to turn, or when to brake. Hence when I first joined the Comancheros there wasn’t a lot of riding going on. Jock’s idea of going out was to go to the same hotel and do the same thing every week. It was always Saturday night at the Ermington Hotel, playing pool. There’d be no runs to different parts of Sydney like we used to do in the Gladiators. I suggested we go to different pubs where they had bands on, and we started riding into places like Newtown and Glebe, up the Cross, into Darlinghurst and Taylor Square. We also started going for runs out to Blacktown and up to Windsor. It was a motorcycle club, after all, and that’s what most of the blokes were there for. They enjoyed the ride.

Not everyone, though. Jock’s inner circle were more like him, particularly his two lieutenants, Foghorn and Snowy. Both were life members and always seemed to be in Jock’s ear.

Snowy was about five eleven, with thin hair and a thin build. He wasn’t a bad bike mechanic but I rarely saw him actually riding. Under Jock’s rules, if you were a life member you could do as you liked, so if he didn’t want to turn up on his bike, he didn’t have to. Instead, he’d go everywhere in his ute. This made the Comancheros completely different from any other club, where the bikes were the reason for being.

Then there was Foghorn, a little bloke with big-man syndrome. He was scrawny – couldn’t have been more than five eight and sixty kilos if he was lucky – with straggly hair and a little goatee. He walked with a limp and didn’t ride his bike much either.

Snowy and Foghorn didn’t like it when my brothers and I came into the club. Not only had our arrival made the club a lot stronger, it had also started attracting more people to the Comancheros. The club was growing and you could see Snowy and Foghorn being pushed aside. Before, they’d been the big fish in a small pond, but they were quickly becoming tiddlers in a big pond. They wanted the power and the attention back with them.

A
SIDE FROM
the petty power squabbles and Jock’s military caper, though, the Comancheros were a tight club. There were some tough blokes and, along with my brothers, a couple of good fighters. There was plenty of riding, partying and blueing to be had.

It was the end of the seventies and we were at a concert down at Parramatta Park when a fight broke out among three other outlaw clubs. There was brawling all over the place, and when one of our members, Lard, decided to get stuck into a bloke, things spilt over into our club. Next thing I saw, Jock was getting thumped. It was the first time I’d seen Jock in a fight, and he was losing badly. I went over and smashed his opponent. He went down and then someone else was calling for me. ‘Caesar! Caesar!’ It was Roach. Three blokes had him down on the ground and were punching the shit out of him. Roach couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but he was staunch. He was always right in there, bleeding but giving it a red-hot go. I grabbed a chain with a big padlock on it from the front of someone’s bike and walked up behind these blokes.
Whack. Whack. Whack
.

It was the sort of fight that really got you pumped up. You were punching on with your brothers and you could feel your blood turning hot. There was that buzz you got when you were outnumbered and you were fighting together for your club. There were baseball bats, knives, chains, the whole lot, and then someone would yell out the club name. You’d hear it again and could feel your blood getting hotter. You’d start swinging harder and harder.

I’d dropped the three blokes and was helping Roach up when suddenly there were six or seven more blokes charging down the park towards me. As they got near I grabbed Roach by the belt and the shoulder and threw him at their legs like a bowling ball. They tumbled back and I started smashing into them with the padlock and chain. Then someone yelled that the coppers were coming, and in an instant the fight broke up. Members from each club returned to their own little campsites as the cops appeared and started giving everyone a hard time.

We decided we’d hit the road. But while I was rounding up the old ladies I ran into four detectives and they started quizzing me about the club: How many people were in the Comancheros? Who was the president? Who was the sergeant?

‘Get fucked.’

Apparently they didn’t like my answer because they handcuffed me, and with two Ds gripping my arms, the senior bloke in the safari suit started whacking me in the guts. ‘Come on, tell me what I want to know.’

‘Get fucked.’

He continued whacking away, until one of the Ds yelled out, ‘His club’s coming.’

I looked over my shoulder and there were six Comos coming down the park. The senior D gave me one final whack, right in the nuts, before they uncuffed me and went screaming out of the park.

Well, after that whack to the nuts, I saw stars, but I stayed on my feet and managed to walk back to my bike.

I was pretty crook for the next few days. I missed a club meeting. We had a run to Wisemans Ferry coming up the following weekend so Snoddy, who I’d become good mates with since our first meeting at the club party, rang and asked me how I was feeling.

‘I’m pissing blood.’

‘Just stay there and don’t worry about the run,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word to Jock.’

Next thing I got a call from Jock. ‘Caesar, you stay at home, mate. Don’t worry about the run.’

The blokes left on the run on the Saturday morning, but come Saturday afternoon I felt weak about not being there. I was all strapped up so I thought, Fuck it. I got my bike out, kicked her over and headed to Wisemans Ferry, about seventy kilometres away.

Halfway there I felt this wet, warm sensation like I’d pissed my pants. I pulled over to find I was bleeding. I took off my shirt and stuffed it down the front of my jeans.

When I turned up at Wisemans Ferry the first one to see me was Shadow. I obviously looked like shit because straightaway he asked me what was wrong. I told him I was bleeding, so the rest of the club gathered round. They were walking into people’s backyards and grabbing towels off washing lines. I had towels stuck down the front of my jeans and on the seat of my bike. Shadow and Wack followed me home and put my bike away. I ended up in Western Suburbs Hospital where they told me I had a ruptured groin from where the copper had hit me. I spent the next week in bed.

O
UTSIDE OF
my brothers, the best bluers in the club were Davo and Sheepskin. Davo was a happy-go-lucky bloke with curly blond hair and a ginger beard who loved riding his bike. Me and him became good mates. Sheepskin had joined the club not long before me so we used to hang round together a fair bit and he’d invite me to his place for tea. I never asked Sheepskin where his nickname came from, but nearly the whole time I knew him he wore a sheepskin vest, so it might’ve come from that. One day when I was up at Sheepskin’s place he went to get something out of a cupboard, and when he opened the door the shelves were just lined with trophy after trophy from karate tournaments. He’d done a lot of martial arts but he was a good street fighter too. That might be why we got on so well together. In fact, all the Campbell brothers were close to Sheepskin. We were similar, too, in that if you pushed us, well, you’d bitten off more than you could chew. Sheepskin was one of these blokes that wouldn’t just give you a black eye or break your nose, he’d take out your eye or rip off your ear.

The only thing that me and Sheepskin really disagreed on was the issue of fighting between members. When I joined the Comos and got into my first meeting, I noticed that some of the tougher blokes were standing over the blokes that weren’t real good fighters. Basically saying, ‘If you don’t vote with me, I’ll getcha after the meeting and punch your head in.’

When I saw that going on, I put up a rule that no member could fight another member for any reason whatsoever. Hands went up everywhere. The rule got passed. And all of a sudden you saw blokes that hardly said a word at meetings standing up and giving their opinion on things. It worked really well. But Sheepskin didn’t like it. He didn’t want to stand over people in meetings, but if someone rubbed him up the wrong way he wanted the right to offer that bloke outside. The problem was, Sheepskin was that good a fighter, if he really wanted to punch on with someone, the other bloke would end up in hospital.

So we had to come up with a new way to settle arguments. Even in a tight club, there’s going to be blokes that don’t get on, or disagree over something. So I stood up at the meeting and said, ‘Look, you don’t have to respect the bloke, but respect the colours. While he’s wearing the same colours as you, you just don’t fight. Whoever wants to be in the club the most will call it quits and end the argument.’

It worked. All the time I was with the club there wasn’t one member who ever dropped his colours and walked away because of an argument. You’d see members giving each other dirty looks, but then they’d sit back down. It might take three or four months but eventually they’d start talking to each other again.

To this day I’ve never laid a hand on a person who wears the same colours as me. But the day I get rid of my colours, well, there’ll be a few blokes in for a big shock.

W
ITHIN
M
ONTHS
of being patched, I got a phone call from Jock asking me to be his sergeant-at-arms. I didn’t want to accept at first. We already had a sergeant-at-arms, Roger, who was a decent bloke, and I was just happy to be a member. I’d made some good friends in Sheepskin, Snoddy and Davo, and was enjoying hanging round with them.

‘Nah, thanks anyway,’ I told him.

But Jock wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I think the main reason that he wanted me as sergeant was because he knew I could fight, and that I didn’t care what I did to win. Maybe it was another way to get me and my brothers in tight. Plus he knew I didn’t drink or take drugs. His big argument was that the sergeant-at-arms at the time, Roger, liked to hit the bong and have a few drinks. ‘You know that at the end of the night, Roger is wasted. He doesn’t know what’s going on.’