Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs (23 page)

‘I’m a mechanic,’ said Link and soon afterwards was allowed to pass through.

Boone was next. ‘What do you do for a living? Don’t think about it, just tell me.’

‘I’m a mechanic too,’ said Boone. ‘I work with that bloke who just went through.’

‘Okay. Where are you staying?’

Boone fished into his pocket and pulled out the note with the address the Florida Outlaws had given him. Having come direct from them, Boone assumed it was a ‘safe’ address that would not draw any undue attention. But as he
read it out, Boone could see a deep frown appear on the official’s forehead.

‘Give me that again.’

‘Boone quickly transposed some of the numbers in the address, hopefully choosing a property on the other side of the road and pretended like he’d made a mistake.

‘I should hope so. That first address you gave me is the headquarters of the notorious Florida Outlaws. They’re one of the worst, organised crime gangs in all of America. They’ve been responsible for at least eighty unsolved murders in the last couple of years alone. Whatever you do, don’t have anything to do with them.’

All the Midland Outlaws made it safely through immigration, but as they gathered outside the terminal waiting for their ride to take them to the clubhouse, they started to feel uncomfortable, a feeling that got worse when they received a text message telling them that Rainer wasn’t going to be able to make it to the show and that they would be on their own.

They had been to war with rival gangs, they had shot at their rivals and been shot at on countless occasions. They had fought and fucked and partied the way only outlaws can. But for the first time ever, they were beginning to worry that they had gotten in over their heads.

With its near-constant sunshine, glorious beaches, vibrant party scene and heavy emphasis on a laid-back lifestyle, Florida has long been a biker’s paradise. The first race meeting at Daytona Beach took place in 1937 and, apart from a hiatus during World War Two, the rally has taken place every year since. Today, every March, some half a
million bikers from around the world attend the ten-day long event making it one of the largest gatherings of its kind on the planet.

Like California, clubs based in the region have the chance to ride all year round, but while the West Coast will forever be associated with the Hell’s Angels, Florida has long been seen as exclusively Outlaws territory. This started during the late fifties, back when the club was still known as the Chicago Outlaws and several members began spending the winter in Florida to escape the bitter north. The visitors from Illinois soon became friendly with a club based in the small city of Hollywood, midway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Known to local media as the Iron Cross MC – their patch featured an oversized red cross pattée on a white background – the club’s official moniker was actually Outlaws MC, a name which appeared in red on white lettering on a small rocker just above the cross.

Led by the formidable James ‘Big Jim’ Nolan, a flame-haired Goliath of a man with a black belt in Taekwondo, the club first gained a reputation for extreme violence in 1965 when members followed home a farm worker who accidentally cut them up on the Florida turnpike and shot dead his wife.

The shared name led to an instant bond between the two gangs and Nolan and his comrades soon agreed that, of all the many, many bikers they had met over the years during Daytona and other events, the Chicago Outlaws were by far their favourites. The feeling was mutual and when the Outlaws dropped ‘Chicago’ from their name and began to expand into other areas, the Florida bikers were among the first they asked to join their brotherhood.

In July 1967, Outlaws National President Harry ‘Stairway’ Henderson and a few other members travelled down to Hollywood to meet up with Big Jim, hand over two dozen sets of new black and white ‘Charlie’ patches and personally sanction the charter. It took only a few weeks for the new chapter to hit the headlines once again with another act of violence, but this time the reverberations were felt all the way around the world.

On Sunday 12th November 1967, two Florida Outlaws pulled up outside St Mary’s hospital in West Palm Beach and dropped off a red-haired, freckle-faced eighteen-year-old girl named Christine Deese. Clearly in terrible pain, she showed the doctors her hands and explained that she had fallen on some boards with two protruding nails, which had then passed right through her palms. Staff at the hospital were immediately suspicious and, after administering treatment, called the County Sheriff: the nails had passed through the exact centre of each hand and it seemed highly unlikely that this could have occurred by accident. The Sheriff shared their suspicions and tracked down the girl’s father, an auxiliary police chief.

Christine’s father arrived on the scene within the hour and took her off alone to a quiet room. The pair emerged fifteen minutes later with the young girl in floods of tears but willing to tell the whole truth: Deese was the old lady of Outlaw Norman ‘Spider’ Risinger, the same man who seven years later would help spark the global war between the Outlaws and the Hell’s Angels by literally blowing the heads off three of his rivals with a shotgun.

Spider had become furious when Christine failed to hand over ten dollars she had made working as a prostitute earlier
that day. By way of punishment, Spider and four Outlaw buddies decided to nail Christine to a tree in a remote part of Juno Beach, ten miles north of West Palm. She stood on tiptoe and placed her palms on the trunk but didn’t scream or fight as they hammered the four-inch long, iron nails through her flesh: ‘They said they would bash my face in with a hammer if I did,’ she said later.

Christine spent half an hour hanging from the tree while Spider and the others drank beer, smoked dope and tossed insults at her. They eventually pulled her down and took her back to the clubhouse. The Outlaws finally agreed to take her to hospital when the wounds looked as though they were becoming infected, but only after they had dreamt up what they believed was a plausible story to explain the injuries.

The shocking case made local, national and international headlines and prompted State Governor Claude Kirk to declare war on the gang. Risinger and another Outlaw were quickly jailed and a posse was set up to track down the three others involved who had fled first to Chicago (where they were hidden by members of the mother chapter) and then to Detroit where they hid out with a local gang called the Renegades.

The Governor was there in person at Palm Beach International Airport when the fugitives were brought back in. ‘This bunch of bums has got the word they’re not welcome in Florida,’ he told the massed ranks of reporters who had come to witness the scene. ‘I hope young, thrill-seeking girls who go with them know now they can get their fingers burned – or, in this case, their hands nailed.’

But Risinger had simply been following protocol. The
chief source of Outlaws’ income at the time came from old ladies working as prostitutes or dancers and Big Jim Nolan had set up strict rules and regulations about how the business was to be run. The women wore special patches which designated them as the ‘property of’ either individual Outlaws or the club as a whole.

The old ladies were put to work in brothels, strip clubs and topless go-go dancing bars on the understanding that they would give all the money they earned to their Outlaw men and do whatever was asked of them without question. They were also told to refrain from taking drugs unless they had been given permission to do so.

If any of the old ladies withheld earnings or tried to run off or broke the rules in any other way, her Outlaw could administer whatever punishment he felt suitable – most often a lengthy beating. If the behaviour was deemed more serious, the woman might be subjected to ‘training’ – which often involved being sent to a prostitution ‘lock up’ at a truck stop. There the woman would be on call for twenty-four hours a day for as long as the ‘training’ lasted, often a period of several weeks.

Despite all this becoming known to a wider public, Governor Kirk’s warnings fell on deaf ears. Dozens of young women still flocked to the sprawling mobile home that served as the clubhouse for the south Florida chapter of the Outlaws. Even Christine Deese herself continued to hang around with the gang once she had recovered from her ordeal, proudly wearing the nails they had used to crucify her on a chain around her neck.

Under Big Jim Nolan’s leadership, the club grew rapidly throughout Florida and soon had the largest concentration
of Outlaws anywhere in the whole United States. Along with founding members like James Starrett, Frederick Hegney, Michael Cave, Clarence Smith and Timothy Duke, Big Jim found himself at the helm of the most ruthless biker gang in the world. They spent the next decade killing and maiming people with virtual impunity. Anyone who threatened to talk to the police or betray their secrets was ruthlessly executed.

The killing of the three Hell’s Angels in the spring of 1974 was just the start. In the years that followed, the Florida Outlaws would be responsible for more than eighty brutal murders. And much of the violence was directed against the very women whose income they relied on to support the club in the first place.

Joyce Karleen first met the Outlaws in August 1974 when she was hanging out in Daytona Beach and looking for a job. She met two men who invited her to a party in Hollywood and said they might be able to help her find some kind of employment. They took her to the Outlaws clubhouse and she soon met Big Jim Nolan.

Karleen had been in the house for only a few hours when Nolan ordered her to fetch him a beer. Unfamiliar with the role of women in the biker world, Karleen replied that if he wanted a beer he should get it himself. Nolan hit her then pulled out a gun and told her to go with him to a back room so he could fill her in on the realities of being an Outlaw old lady.

Nolan explained that Karleen would be expected to work and give over all her earnings to the club. She would also have to do exactly as she was told. He then ordered her to give him a blow job. Karleen hesitated until Nolan placed
the barrel of the gun to the side of her head and repeated the order. This time Karleen complied.

Nolan then raped her and was soon joined by eight other Outlaws. Leaving, he told Karleen to do exactly what the others wanted or he would beat her again. Once he was out of the room Karleen began to struggle. Nolan returned and punched her in the mouth several times until she was too weak to resist.

The next day Karleen was taken to a local lounge to work as a topless dancer alongside several other Outlaw old ladies. Every penny she earned went directly to members of the club. At the end of that first week the awful nightmare that had become Joyce Karleen’s life took a turn for the worse. Several bikers at the club came to believe she was responsible for stealing some clothes from a ‘patched’ old lady and decided that the newcomer needed to be punished.

As she left the lounge after work, Karleen was abducted and taken back to the clubhouse, tied to a chair and stripped half naked. The bikers then took it in turns to punch and kick her. When she refused to admit to the theft, they heated up a spoon on the stove and used it to burn her arms and breasts. When she passed out, they covered her head with a sheet and fetched the other Outlaw old ladies from around the clubhouse and escorted them into the room. They removed the sheet from over Karleen’s head and told the women to take a good look. This, they explained, would be what would happen to them if they misbehaved.

The Outlaws then took Karleen and dumped her in a field where they expected her to die. She didn’t and would later be a witness against the gang.

Outlaw old ladies get few privileges but one is that if they ever have problems with ‘outsiders’ they can count on the club to come to their rescue. In early 1980 Mary Lou Rodriguez was a popular girl who wore her ‘Property of Outlaws’ patch with a certain amount of pride. When someone slashed the tyres of her car one night after a party, she naturally asked some of the more senior club members including Timothy Duke to help her sort it out. When they failed to do so to her satisfaction, Rodriguez became angry.

Back at Duke’s house, Rodriguez and Duke got into an argument and she stormed out. Duke told the other Outlaws at the house that Rodriguez was going to ‘rat him out’, and that he was going to kill her. Duke ripped an unused telephone cable off the baseboard, which he said he would use to strangle Rodriguez.

Later that same evening, Rodriguez returned to Duke’s house. An Outlaw named Hawkins said that he wanted to have sex with Rodriguez before Duke killed her. After Hawkins was through with Rodriguez, she went into the bathroom. Duke followed her in and started to strangle her with the telephone cord. When he thought Rodriguez was dead he dropped her to the floor. But when Duke released his grip, he heard Rodriguez’s lungs fill with air again, so he ran to retrieve a spear gun from his bedroom. Duke returned to the bathroom with the spear gun and shot Rodriguez through the head. Duke kept her corpse in a trailer on his property for several days, and then finally had Hawkins dispose of it.

Around the time of the Rodriguez murder, Big Jim Nolan spent time in Florida state prison on drugs charges. Ever thoughtful, one of his fellow Outlaws, Ronald Watchmaker,
arranged for him to receive a ‘gift’ when he was released – a young woman named Iris Geoghagen.

Wanting to get some use out of the ‘gift’ himself, Watchmaker ultimately decided to give Nolan forty-nine per cent of Geoghagen while he was in prison and keep the rest. Having met Geoghagen, Nolan decided he wanted the whole package and offered to buy out Watchmaker for $2,000. Unable to decide whether to take the deal, Watchmaker asked Geoghagen whose old lady she would rather be. Believing that being connected to the more powerful Outlaw would entitle her to more privileges, Geoghagen chose Nolan. She then visited Nolan every weekend in prison, usually smuggling in cocaine and marijuana for him to use and sell on to other inmates.