Copyright © Ross Coulthart and Duncan McNab 2008
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Coulthart, Ross.
Dead man running.
9781741754636 (pbk.)
1. Utah, Steve. 2. Bandido Motor Cycle Club. 3. Gang members – Australia – Biography. 4. Informers – Australia. 5. Motorcycle gangs – Australia. 6. Organised crime – Australia. I. McNab, Duncan. II. Title.
364.1092
Typeset in 11.5/16pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Prologue
1 |
Enter the one-percenters |
2 |
The Bandidos saddle up |
3 |
Not quite a flying start |
4 |
The army will make a man of you |
5 |
Frolicking with the fauna |
6 |
A nice little earner |
7 |
From control to Kaos |
8 |
Yet another life-changing experience |
9 |
Some minor domestics |
10 |
If I had a hammer . . . |
11 |
On the road again |
12 |
The heat of the kitchen |
13 |
Drinking from the top shelf |
14 |
Rats in the rank |
15 |
Into the arms of the crime commission |
16 |
Tropical turf wars |
17 |
Wired for sound |
18 |
Bang bang you’re dead |
19 |
Moving right along |
20 |
Swansong |
21 |
Rat-fucking the feds |
22 |
Sydney ganglands |
23 |
The timely press release |
24 |
Going public |
25 |
The day society lost |
26 |
Another witness burned |
27 |
Bikies and terrorists |
Epilogue
I’m not becoming like them; I am them.
Stevan Utah
It’s a still, sticky day in the lonely pine forests just below the Glasshouse Mountains on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. We are just five minutes up the road from one of the country’s best known landmarks—the Steve Irwin-created Australia Zoo. A few minutes earlier, as we turned off the main highway up Roy’s Road, two tour buses passed us, packed with tourists craning to get their first glimpse of man-eating crocodiles, the world’s deadliest snakes and cuddly koalas. There’s also a golf club nearby, popular with the many retired Queensland and New South Wales policemen who live in the area. This part of Australia is for some reason so popular with ex-New South Wales coppers the New South Wales Retired Police Association has a local branch for its members.
Ironic then, in view of why we take the empty tree-lined road to Beerwah cemetery. Established AD 1936, it is a bleak and forlorn place and today the air is thick with flies. Perfect weather to rot a corpse. Which is what we are here to find. It may seem more than a little absurd, searching for a body in a cemetery, but somewhere in the thick undergrowth, under the dense carpet of pine needles, no doubt tucked away off one of the myriad access tracks, we are told there is a body . . . waiting to be found.
We don’t even know his name. We only know that one night, in a bloody act of homicidal rage fuelled by the suspicion that the victim was a police informant—a ‘dog’—a Bandido bikie boss, Joseph ‘Hombre’ Jonker is alleged to have shot him twice outside the Caloundra clubhouse. Ironically, Hombre’s trusted associate, who saw the murder happen, went on for a brief time to become one of Australia’s most valuable witnesses to the organised crime networks inside outlaw motorcycle gangs. That witness’s name is Stevan Utah. And the reason we are probing the undergrowth around this graveyard for a long-dead corpse is because Utah says Hombre Jonker told him he dumped the body somewhere in or around the graveyard in which we are now standing.
Utah is a self-confessed criminal, and he has seen and participated in some horrible things. He is an accomplice after-the-fact to a brutal murder, and a witness to numerous bloody bikie beatings—and he is a victim of a nasty attempted hit himself.
Inside the bikie gangs he witnessed extensive and highly profitable drug manufacture and dealing and he has himself been an underworld cook of the illegal methamphetamine drug ‘ice’, or ‘crystal meth’ as it’s also known. From the inside, Utah has seen the bikies trading cash, chemicals and guns with notorious mafia drug families and other outlaw motorcycle gangs. He has also been a notable international wildlife smuggler and—courtesy of Her Majesty’s Australian Army explosives technicians’ course—not only does he know how to blow things up, he has also witnessed dealings in weapons stolen from supposedly secure army repositories.
Utah took on the personality, swagger and diction of the bikie world, becoming so much a fixture in the clubhouse he was offered ‘full-patch’ status (bikie parlance for full membership—denoted by the gang’s distinctive ‘patch’ worn on their vest) if he got himself the essential Harley-Davidson. For the police, who had long been frustrated with their inability to penetrate the bikie gangs, especially the ultra security cautious Bandidos, Utah was able to show the reality behind the public protestations of many bikie leaders that they are all law-abiding rebels unfairly persecuted by police. Not all bikies are criminals, but Utah’s eye-witness accounts show that outlaw motorcycle gangs are a national menace, and they have become a haven for some nasty thugs.
His story is a wake-up call. It shows the big lie behind the charity bike runs and hospital fundraisers the outlaw motorcycle gangs organise to sanitise their public image. Utah’s recordings and detailed reports to police showed them just how involved many senior bikies are in extensive organised crime both in Australia and overseas. And in an act that he believes was partly his undoing, he also fingered corrupt police who enjoyed the illicit and often salacious entertainment in gang clubhouses—the strippers and the prostitutes—and who, all too often, tipped off bikie leaders to forthcoming raids.
When we first listened to Utah’s colourful account down a crackling phone line from the other side of the world, his story seemed preposterous. It all sounded too lurid, too cartoon-like to be true. The extraordinary failures and questionable decisions by state and federal police agencies seemed too ridiculous to be believable. But with even initial cursory enquiries, his tale began checking out. Court files showed Utah really had been charged with murder and that those charges had inexplicably been dropped. It was clear he must indeed have known something very valuable for police to make such calls.
Then there was a road trip to meet a well-respected Queensland lawyer who an intermediary had said would brief us on Utah’s bona fides, a man who had witnessed Utah’s negotiations with police from three different agencies. He refused to talk about his client on the phone and we met in the crowded bar–restaurant of a local country pub, where his office staff were farewelling a colleague. Pushing a package of computer disks and documents across the table, he was clearly relieved to get them out of his office. Utah had authorised him to pass them on.
With a nervous glance across the adjacent tables of jolly country folk enjoying a boozy lunch, he explained that some of the enclosed documents were the statements he had prepared to enable his client to seek indemnity from Australia’s peak crime-fighting body, the Australian Crime Commission. The crimes they detailed were, he explained, so horrific that he had not wanted his office staff to know anything about them because he feared the risk to them if they did: ‘I don’t want my name associated with this fellow at all. I’ve checked him out as best I can. He’s the real deal. I think he did what he says he did. And I warn you, he has been involved with some very dangerous people.’
He is a decent man and, as we shook hands on the street, he told us he felt Utah’s case raised major concerns in relation to just how serious police agencies are about combating the organised crime menace in outlaw motorcycle gangs. He had seen it before and it would happen again, he warned, if nothing was done to change the system that handles the ‘crims who turn’.
We’d driven back to Brisbane and then boarded a plane to Sydney, with the documents burning a hole in the briefcase, too wary of peeks from fellow plane passengers to attempt to read them on the crowded plane. When we did finally read them, what they detailed was chilling. But even more disturbing was the alleged failures by police agencies. The evidence suggested that Utah had been one of Australia’s most important moles inside the bikie gangs—and that his usefulness to police had been squandered because of personality clashes, police distrust, petty bickering and stupid turf wars.
Which was why today, in the sticky heat of the Glasshouse Mountains hinterlands, we were looking for a corpse somewhere around this cemetery. We had it on good authority that, despite Stevan Utah giving the same information to police about Hombre Jonker dumping a body somewhere around this graveyard, the police had never done a search. After three months of investigating Utah’s claims, we had learned very fast to take them seriously. We knew from the documents, and from talking to police sources, that the last time Utah told sceptical police he knew where a body was, it had taken three searches, but they finally found another murder victim exactly where he said they would.
To the Bandidos and other gangs in clubhouses along Australia’s east coast, from Queensland down to Geelong in Victoria, Utah was a trusted hang-around, a novitiate to the strange and violent hierarchical world of the patch-clad biker gangs. Rat-cunning and extremely intelligent, Utah was drawn to the camaraderie, mateship and discipline of the outlaw motorcycle gangs; and in his chameleonlike way, he became a key player in many of their often publicly denied extensive criminal enterprises.
Except for what he describes as a police blunder, Utah might today have been inside the Bandidos, still passing the covertly recorded conversations on miniature digital audio recorders to his police handlers at luggage lockers in Brisbane city buildings. Instead, Utah is now a man on the run. Wanted by police and hunted by his vengeful former bikie blood brothers, he admits he is a marked man—a ‘dead man running’, to use his own words. In hiding overseas, Utah is anxious to prove the value of the information he passed on to police—tips which, he says, have all too often been ignored by our major crime-fighting agencies.
The story of the breakdown in his relationship with his police handlers is what has brought us here to this lonely graveyard. If they had not fallen out with each other, there is a good chance Utah would, like many witnesses who have worked for police on the inside of an organised crime network, never have told his story. He would probably be living under a new name on the other side of the world, maybe running a pet shop trading in his beloved tropical animals—and his customers would be none the wiser. Instead, Stevan Utah is a haunted man, constantly looking over his shoulder—waiting for a bullet, a knife, a bomb, or the cruel beating which will finally signal that his bikie colleagues have found him.
That police blunder, Utah claims, almost cost him his life. His former bikie brothers tried to kill him because they suspected—correctly as it turned out—that he was a police informer. The way Utah tells it, he was dumped by his police handlers once his informant role was compromised. He says he was forced to flee overseas, painting Queensland police efforts to return him to Australia on criminal charges as an attempt by that force to silence him from revealing what he knows.
Whatever the truth of his protestations of innocence, Stevan Utah knows a lot. And with the same discipline with which he set about informing on the crimes of his bikie brothers, he now intends making things as difficult as possible for his former Bandido associates. He intends to get even with the men who tried to kill him by revealing what he knows—to anyone prepared to listen. And that includes helping find the corpses of some of the people he saw them murder:
I know this is going to sound glib and self-serving but I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks. I am sorry for what I did and I want those families to get some closure. And if I get fucking knocked in the process, I’ll be glad to have done so with all the best intentions. Coppers will scoff but I truly want to put this all behind me. I want people to know just how fucking dangerous these people are . . . because for a few years I was one of them.
There is a movie Utah loves called Donnie Brasco, an American gangster flick about a young undercover cop who penetrates a mafia gang and becomes a witness to the ugly world of killings, extortion and intimidation enforced by the strict mafia code of silence. Utah is full of admiration for how close that film comes to describing the world he witnessed for years inside the outlaw motorcycle gangs. There is a phrase he quotes from the mouth of the young undercover cop, who realises that being inside the mafia is changing him: ‘All my life I’ve tried to be the good guy, the guy in the white fucking hat. And for what? For nothing. I’m not becoming like them; I am them.’ Stevan Utah admits that for a time he became what they are. And the window he offers onto the violent criminal world of outlaw motorcycle gangs is what this book is all about.
Back up in Beerwah, where we’re gently stepping through the knee-deep scrub surrounding the grassy graveyard with its neatly ordered tombstones and crosses, it is easy to understand why, if Bandido bikie boss Joseph Hombre Jonker did dump a body here, he chose this spot. On a Google satellite photo this is a rare, quiet, place close to the crowded tourist and retiree strips along the beaches just ten kilometres or so to the east. We are barely half an hour’s drive from the clubhouse where, according to Utah’s account, the victim was shot years ago. This tiny speck of green lawn and red dirt is surrounded by a dark swathe of green—the Beerburrum State Forest—on a map otherwise dotted with retirement villages, resorts and tourist parks. For a bikie boss carrying a corpse in the back of his car, Beerwah cemetery is just the place to dump it.
Left out in the open in a tropical climate like this, insects alone can turn a fully fleshed corpse to bare bones in just a couple of weeks. Counterintuitively, the tropical air decomposes a body in the open eight times faster than if it is buried. There is a small chance the murderer just dumped his victim here on the ground—some distance from the nearby tombstones of Beerwah cemetery’s more legitimate residents. Maybe Hombre took the gamble that no-one would ever be game to venture out into the long grass and scrub under the pine trees. It concentrates the mind wonderfully to know that this region is home to one of the world’s deadliest snakes—the Coastal Taipan. Every time we kick a clump in the undergrowth to see if it’s a boot or a bone, we expect to see a flash of golden olive scales and feel the sickening pain of snake fangs in the leg.
Out here too, there are wild animals, including pigs and dogs, that might disturb a corpse lying in the open. Chances are the victim was buried. From the other side of the world, Stevan Utah is adamant: ‘Hombre would have buried him, but not too deep. Probably no more than a couple of feet. He wouldn’t be standing on ceremony. No fucking six feet under. Too much effort. I remember though he giggled ’cos he’d given him a proper send-off at a cemetery.’
Sadly, human nature dictates that even the most beautiful spots in the world must have an underbelly and this part of south-east Queensland is no exception. It is possible to holiday here in the Glasshouse Mountains, enjoying the hippy mountain markets around Flaxton and Maleny and the cooling waters at Kondalilla Falls, and experience a tranquil excursion into a gentler part of Australia. It is a favourite playground for Brisbane city-dwellers looking for a cooler alternative to the brassy, plastic tourist strips running from Noosa down to the Gold Coast.
And that is pretty much the same with outlaw motorcycle gangs around much of Australia. They operate, deliberately, just under the radar, keeping a low profile and occasionally promoting a charity event to get some positive spin in the evening news. Most citizens go about their normal lives oblivious to the numerous unsolved murders and the growing casualties of gun violence and illicit drugs—all of them victims of now systematic bikie organised crime.
For us, that trip to Beerwah cemetery was just the beginning of a trip to a seamy side of Australia we never knew existed.
The trouble was caused by the one percent deviant that tarnished the public image of both motorcycles and motorcyclists.
American Motorcyclist Association
The two wheels hit the road in 1885 in Stuttgart, Germany, when Gottlieb Daimler fired up the world’s first petrol-engined motorcycle. Just like the four-wheel car designed by fellow German Karl Benz, the concept took off. Motorcycles were the natural successor to the horse, offering low-cost transport, freedom and mobility.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers took to the sky in North Carolina’s Kill Devil Hills, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, and William Harley and brothers Arthur and Walter Davidson formed the Harley-Davidson Motor Cycle Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Federation of American Cyclists was born. The club first met in Brooklyn, New York. The club lasted only until 1924, when it was replaced by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). From its earliest days the association was committed to fostering what these days we’d call a ‘positive image’ of motorcyclists.
One feature of the federation that made its way into the activities of the American Motorcycle Association was the ‘gypsy’ tours. In its issue of 19 March 1925, Motorcycle & Bicycle reported on the rapidly growing popularity of the tours. It said, ‘the Gypsy Tour idea originated eight or nine years ago, the object being to set a certain date for an outing where riders, dealers and everyone interested in motorcycles would tour to some convenient spot for a day’s sport and a real old fashioned good time.’
On the fourth of July weekend of 1947, the second fourth of July America celebrated in the peace following World War II, around four thousand bike enthusiasts and gypsy tourists gathered in Hollister, California. The positive public image of motorcyclists got a terrible battering that weekend. The ‘real old fashioned good time’ was reminiscent not of a picnic, but of a saloon brawl from a B-grade Hollywood western. Lots of boozing, reckless driving and brawling put the quiet seat of San Benito County on the national map. Chief instigators of the problem came from a group of bikers known as the ‘Boozefighters’, who found their entertainment by hurling empty liquor bottles at anyone within range. They were joined in the mayhem by the equally stylishly named ‘Pissed Off Bastards’. Thanks to Life magazine, the town that was previously best known for straddling a branch of the notorious San Andreas Fault was now known around the United States as the scene of the ‘Hollister Riot’.
By the end of that weekend the toll was three people seriously hurt, sixty suffering various scrapes, bruises and breaks, and fifty arrested. One local sheriff described it as simply ‘a hell of a mess’. On the cover of Life was a member of the Boozefighters. The gentleman was seated astride his bike, which was mounted on a pile of shattered bottles. A bottle of booze was in each of his outflung fists. The good public relations of the American Motorcyclist Association was in tatters.
They were horrified, and quickly held a press conference. Their spokesman tried to quell the story, noting, ‘The trouble was caused by the one percent deviant that tarnished the public image of both motorcycles and motorcyclists’. Many years later, the AMA would try again, saying, ‘We condemn them. They’d be condemned if they rode horses, mules, surfboards, bicycles or skateboards. Regretfully, they picked motorcycles.’ The bike gangs that were soon to make their impact on the scene rather liked the notion of being a ‘one-percenter’ and clutched it to their leather-clad bosoms. Marlon Brando’s swaggering, leather-jacketed, Triumph Thunderbird-riding bikie in the 1953 classic The Wild One, based on the riot, added to the mystique of the one-percenters.
The picture in Life magazine, and Mr Brando’s starring role as a free spirit, caught the mood of many young Americans. Most had lived through the Depression only to find themselves drawn into the brutality of World War II. Many had come back to America only to be saddled with mundane jobs. The adrenalin rush found in war was gone. The rush to conformity in the vacuum that followed war, and the looming Cold War, became oppressive. A little touch of freedom was what they wanted. The timing was perfect because war surplus motorbikes were both cheap and plentiful. The iron horse replaced the horse and it was time for a more modern reprise of the old West.
One of the first major bike gangs to emerge in the Hollister aftermath, and still the dominant gang in the world today, was the Hells Angels. There are a few tales of how the name came about. Various Hells Angels members have disagreed with the origins over the years; however, all the tales offer a glimpse of adventure and life on the edge. Some reckon it hails from the US army’s elite World War II troops of the 11th Airborne Division. These men were paratroopers who parachuted themselves behind enemy lines in France, apparently with twenty pounds of TNT strapped to each leg, and bent on mayhem. They took the nickname ‘Hells Angels’ from their descent.
Others prefer the story that the name was borrowed from the ‘Hells Angels’, the US Air Force 303rd Bombardment Group that bombed occupied Europe from their base in Molesworth, England. The lads from the 303rd had in turn borrowed the name from the 1930 Howard Hughes film Hell’s Angels about pilots from World War I. There’s a fair chance that the fighting men of either group weren’t deeply impressed at having their war exploits associated with a bike gang.
The Hells Angels club began in 1948 in a town called Fontana, California. Fontana is in San Bernardino County and lies on the outer edge of modern Los Angeles. It rose quickly from obscurity in the 1940s thanks to the arrival of the San Bernardino Freeway and the Kaiser steel mill, which supplied steel to build World War II’s famous Liberty ships. For men coming back from the war it was a place where they could find work and live cheaply. It was also, in 1948, the site of first McDonald’s fast food restaurant.
The formation of the gang was the outcome of ongoing tensions between the Boozefighters and the Pissed Off Bastards. It all got too much for old Bastard Otto Friedl. He formed a splinter group and created the Hells Angels. Over the next decade the irreverent or just plain antisocial behaviour of the Angels saw their fellow southern Californians grow less tolerant.
By 1956 the more tolerant locals of the San Francisco area saw the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels become the club’s de facto US head-quarters. Among the Oakland ranks was one Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, who had just come out of a hitch in the US army. Barger reckoned he had a choice of either becoming a beatnik or a motorcycle rider, and chose the latter. Despite his lack of imagination at the time, he would eventually become the public face and spinmeister of the gang. He’d also end up as an author and media tart, and be self-described as ‘An American Legend’.
Like many of those who followed, Barger was the product of a lousy childhood. Born in 1938 in California, his mother left him with his alcoholic father and an older sister when he was only four months old. While at school he found a taste and talent for fighting, but unfortunately had a habit of assaulting his teachers. Suspensions from school were not infrequent.
It was Barger who was the driving force behind the gang’s codes of conduct, laws, colours and the like. Thanks to his skill with public relations, the myth of the Hells Angels grew. This gang became the model for the gangs that would follow. Birney Jarvis, an early member of the Hells Angels who later became a police reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, captured the true nature of the bike gangs when he commented, ‘Some of the guys are pure animals. They’d be animals in any society. These guys are outlaw types who should have been born 100 years ago—then they would have been gunfighters.’ Barger took a somewhat softer line, describing his organisation as ‘definitely a men’s club. It’s a group of motorcyclists who like to ride around the country. Having fun and doing it with their friends.’
Things were moving along quite nicely in the myth department until the Labor Day weekend in 1964 when the bikers once again found themselves the focus of the nation. Some of their friends didn’t like the idea of ‘doing it’ with them it seemed. The scene was a weekend run to Monterey, California, until that stage better known for its glorious ocean-front location and John Steinbeck. It was a weekend that the ‘pure animal’ of some members came to the fore. Of that weekend, True, The Man’s Magazine, noted in August 1965 with remarkable accuracy, ‘They call themselves the Hell’s Angels. They ride, they rape and raid like marauding cavalry—and they boast no police force can break up their criminal motorcycle fraternity.’
Bikers converged on the coast around Monterey. The motivation for the gathering was, local police believed, to collect funds to send the remains of Hells Angels San Bernardino chapter vice president, Kenneth Beamer, back to his mother in North Carolina. Beamer’s demise had been caused on the road near San Diego when he found that bike versus truck is an unfair match. Hunter S. Thompson, who would later make his name chronicling the Angels, noted that Beamer ‘had died in the best outlaw tradition: homeless, stone broke, and owning nothing in this world but the clothes on his back and a big bright Harley’.
The lads gathered at a bar called Nick’s that Saturday night, and as the night and the booze wore on, moved down to a bonfire on the beach. That’s when things got completely out of control. A deputy sheriff summoned to the scene stated he ‘arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire surrounded by cyclists of both sexes. Then two sobbing, near-hysterical girls staggered out of the darkness, begging for help. One was completely nude and the other had on only a torn sweater.’ The two teenage girls were both locals, and had come with some friends to gawk at the gathering both at Nick’s and later on the beach. As Hunter S. Thompson commented:
Not even Senator Murphy [a former tap dancer turned senator] could expect them to gather together in a drunken mass for any such elevated pastimes as ping pong, shuffleboard and whist. Their picnics have long been noted for certain beastly forms of entertainment, and any young girl who shows up at a Hell’s Angels bonfire camp at two o’clock in the morning is presumed, by the outlaws, to be in a condition of heat. So it was only natural that the two girls attracted more attention when they arrived at the beach than they had earlier in the convivial bedlam at Nick’s.
The local police didn’t share the same caring view of the lads. They promptly arrested four Hells Angels and charged them with rape. One of the arrested was a guy who could readily be described as the definitive bikie. His name was Terry the Tramp. Six feet two inches tall, two hundred and ten pounds, massive arms, full beard, shoulder-length black hair and, as Thompson described, with ‘a wild jabbering demeanour not calculated to soothe the soul of any personnel specialist. Beyond that, in his twenty-seven years he had piled up a tall and ugly police record: a multitude of arrests from petty theft and battery to rape, narcotics offenses and public cunnilingus.’ The poster boy for bike gangs.
Though Hunter S. Thompson made his name thanks to his sympathetic writings on the gangs, his relationship came to a somewhat ironic end when his subjects turned on him, delivering a very significant kicking. Sonny Barger was no fan of Thompson. Something of a cultural clash, it seemed. He commented:
I don’t like Hunter S. Thompson as a person. He’s probably the greatest writer in the world. When he was with us on a run, we was going to fight the cops one day and he locked himself in the trunk of his car. That guy ain’t my friend. He’s not going to help me; he’s going to run and leave me there when he’s supposed to help us. He also didn’t take care of what he was supposed to do. All we told him was buy us a keg of beer and he didn’t do it. He’s offered to do it later but we don’t want it now. He didn’t do it when he was supposed to. He got beat up by us, but he set that up. After the book was all done he come around us and said can I go on a run with ya. He got in an argument with a guy, he caused a fight, he got beat up and the cover of the book said ‘I met, I lived with and I was almost killed by . . .’ what a guy.
One of the intriguing quirks of the criminal justice system of most western countries is that a major source of a lawyer’s revenue is directly derived from the proceeds of the crimes committed by the people they’re defending. A twist on money laundering perhaps, and rather like the US military policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. It was the need to secure decent legal representation for alleged rapist Terry the Tramp and his three alleged cohorts that, as historians now believe, turned the Hells Angels on to crime as their primary source of cash flow. The crime they turned to was a perfect fit for the mood of California at the birth of the flower power era. Drugs, and in particular marijuana and the community’s rapidly developing taste for amphetamines. Risks were low, profits high and police either weren’t overly interested or just a bit slow to catch on to the trade. Bikies, of course, were none too talkative about their exploits either, so information was tightly held. One quaint gang motto of the time was ‘three can keep a secret if two are dead’. The code of silence was firmly embraced.
The case against the four was very high profile. Thompson wrote, ‘their blood, booze and semen-flecked image would be familiar to readers of the New York Times,Newsweek, The Nation, Time, Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post.’ The light-footed Senator Murphy didn’t miss the chance to up the ante, telling the media, ‘they’re built low to the ground so it’s easier for them to stoop’. In an interesting defence to the bad publicity, one Angel told Newsweek: ‘We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us. When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We’re complete social outcasts—outsiders against society.’ The media loved it.
Despite their national notoriety, all four were freed when a grand jury found insufficient evidence to proceed. There were some serious reservations about the stories of the two girls.
While their defence may have been costly, it was obviously money well spent. However, the success didn’t bring an end to the criminal activities. With cash pouring in hand over fist, the gang just kept on marketing their wares. Why give up a good thing? And it was certainly better than working nine to five. As Barger said, summarising the Hells Angels’ history for the Los Angeles Times (17 May 2001): ‘In the ’60s, we started gettin’ in trouble. The ’70s, we got into a little bit of crime and stuff. And by the ’80s, we were all in prison.’
Barger made it to California’s notorious Folsom Prison near Sacramento following his arrest in 1973 for selling thirty-seven grams of heroin. He commented that his breaking of the law may have had something to do with his exuberant use of cocaine. The judge wasn’t that sympathetic and gaoled him for ten years to life. He joined the alumni that included Charles Manson, not Johnny Cash (despite the songs) and Timothy ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ Leary, the pop-king of the acid counterculture. Leary and Barger were there at the same time, with Barger commenting that Leary was an informant. ‘I don’t like informants any more than I like policemen’, he later said. Barger was released in 1977.
The mystique and notoriety of the Hells Angels for that ‘little bit of crime and stuff’ continued to grow, and by the late 1970s the US government was gravely concerned about their criminal activities. To try and come to grips with the gang, they dusted off some racketeering legislation originally developed for use against the mafia. Unfortunately for the hapless government prosecutors, the case failed dismally. The prosecution cost around $15 million. Prosecutors screamed it was a miscarriage of justice, and Sonny Barger, by then head honcho of the gang, was reported to have thrown a party for the jurors. Angels 1, Government 0.
Federal prosecutors did have a brief stroke of luck in the mid 1980s when Barger and others were arrested for conspiring to violate federal law to commit murder. The murder in question involved plans to bomb the Chicago clubhouse of the Outlaws motorcycle gang. The Hells Angels had been asked to assist and had agreed. What they didn’t know was that the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) had a highly placed informant in the gangs, Anthony Tait, who had set up the plot as a type of ‘sting’ operation and who later gave key evidence. After a lengthy trial, Barger was again behind bars, this time in Arizona. He was released in 1992.
If nothing else, these prosecutions stirred the growth of the Hells Angels. By the end of the twentieth century there were thousands of members in chapters spread around the globe. The FBI considered them a ‘criminal organization’. Canada agreed, with a supreme court judge finding, in 2005, that ‘the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club as it existed in Canada was a criminal organization.’ They are a wealthy global business with many legitimate fronts. However, law enforcement is on the record as stating they’re also deeply involved in drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, extortion, murder and fraud. According to an FBI agent, they operate in a similar manner to ‘network’ marketing organisations, with each member having ‘9 to 30 criminal minions out there working for him all the time’. The Amway of crime perhaps?
Barger, not surprisingly, took a slightly more romantic view, stating, ‘The story of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club is the story of a very select brotherhood of man who will fight and die for each other, no matter what the cause’.
Fuck the world. We are the people our parents warned us about.
motto of the Bandidos
Inspired, for want of a better term, by the Hells Angels’ activities in California reported nationally, and by Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs, a rival gang was formed. These were men who were drawn to what Thompson described as ‘a world most of us would never dare encounter’.
The rival gang was the one with which young Stevan Utah would later become enmeshed: the Bandidos. They were formed in March 1966 in Galveston, Texas, by one Donald Eugene Chambers. Chambers, like many before and many who would follow, was ex-military. He had been a marine and was then working on the docks. The name came from the Mexican bandits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men who ‘refused to live by anyone’s rules but their own’.
An early recruit, Royce Showalter, recalled that Chambers and some cronies had read Thompson’s book. He said, ‘all of us read it to get some ideas on what we should be doing, and then we looked at one another and said “hell, we can do a lot better than these guys” .’ Chambers recruited members from other biker gangs and bars around the waterfront. He was not a particularly civilised man. His daughter, with obviously misplaced reverence, said of him: ‘When daddy started downing shots of Canadian Whiskey, people learned real quick that he was not someone to mess with. God, daddy was famous for the way he could throw a punch. And if that didn’t work, he’d pull out his knife and start swinging that around too!’
According to Showalter, Chambers ‘wanted as many badass bikers who cared about nothing except riding full time on their Harley-Davidsons. He wanted bikers who lived only for the open road. No rules, no bullshit, just the open road.’ The Bandido motto was ‘Fuck the world. We are the people our parents warned us about.’ Just like the Hells Angels years before, many members came from the military, and brought with them planning skills, camaraderie and discipline. They also had a quaint initiation rite. Bikers always rode wearing the club vest. New members were told to put their vest on the ground and then his fellow members would urinate, defecate and vomit on it. The new member would then put the now moist vest back on, hop on his bike, and go motoring until the vest had dried.
Despite this charming rite, the Bandidos grew quickly. Unfortunately for Chambers, he wasn’t around too long to enjoy the success of his new baby. While he didn’t have much in the way of rules, the State of Texas did. Though the Hells Angels talked up their misguided yet vaguely honourable lifestyle, it was pretty obvious from day one that Bandidos were bad through and through, and Chambers had a very hands-on approach to their criminal enterprises.
In 1972 he and two colleagues were arrested for fatally shooting two drug dealers in El Paso. It wasn’t rough frontier justice; it was just a drug deal that had gone horribly wrong. Prior to shooting them, Chambers made them dig their own graves. He also set fire to the bodies before burying them. The State of Texas sent him to prison on two consecutive life sentences. Local police hoped this would create a void that would see the gang disband. They were out of luck.
Into the vacant space at the top stepped Chambers’ right-hand man, Ronnie Hodge. Like Chambers he was a tough man, a former marine and recruited from the docks. Hodge was built like a bear and held a similar view on life to that of Chambers. Under his guidance the gang rapidly developed both its criminal enterprises and its presence in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. Like Chambers, his reign would be brought to an abrupt end by a hefty prison term in 1988. In Hodge’s case it was for bombing the home of a member of a rival gang.
In January 1982 the FBI was reported to be ‘investigating an international mafia style network allegedly involving Australian bike gangs and their counterparts in the US’, for links with ‘dangerous drugs, prostitution, extortion and contract killings’. As one wit noted, ‘a sort of Cosa Nostra on wheels’. One of their prime targets in this investigation was the Bandidos. The FBI noted that the gangs were ‘well-organised, sophisticated, with a regular organization structure’. Other contemporary reports said the gangs had ‘built up a highly sophisticated crime network, amassing tax shelters, high priced lawyers and an arsenal of weapons including machine guns’.
A US Department of Justice report in October 2002 noted the corporatised Bandidos boasted ‘elected and appointed leaders at the international, national and local levels. A president, vice-president, secretary and sergeant at arms represent each level. The leaders establish and enforce Bandidos rules, settle disputes, appoint new officers and often co-ordinate criminal activities.’ More worringly, it noted: ‘earning membership is a lengthy, phased process designed to measure a potential member’s commitment to the outlaw motorcycle gang’ and they are ‘recruiting aggressively in an attempt to boost the membership’. The Bandidos also have ‘recently begun recruiting members who have business and computer skills’. Membership also meant being able to wear the coveted Bandido ‘patch’.
In Australia, the Bandidos fired up their bikes in August 1983. Their first clubhouse was a stately pile on the waterfront on Long Nose Point in Louisa Road, Birchgrove, an elegant Sydney suburb favoured by lawyers and the wealthy end of the media and arts community. The Bandidos enjoyed a superb view of Sydney Harbour from their five-bedroomed, two-bathroomed Federationstyle clubhouse. However, their interior renovations weren’t in keeping with the architecture or the neighbourhood. The genteel pastel-painted dining room was redecorated in yellow, black and red colours, murals of blokes on bikes adorned many walls, and the living room was converted into a ‘discotheque’, even though disco was in its dying days. On one wall was the sign, ‘If it’s white sniff it, if it’s female or it moves fuck it, if it narks kill it’.
Not surprisingly, the neighbours weren’t too pleased and complained bitterly to anyone who would listen. Court action to have the bikies tossed out for ‘disturbing the peace’ didn’t proceed. The bikies continued to enjoy their harbour views.
The original members of the gang had previously been members of the Comancheros. Police believed the founding Bandidos had fallen out with their former mates over drugs. The Bandidos took a loftier view, saying, ‘the split from the Comanchero MC was caused by an ongoing rift between chapters and resulted in a total loss of respect for the mother club especially the founder and club president’.
The Comanchero view of the motivations for the split was a little different. Their president and founder was one William George Ross, born in Glasgow, known as ‘Jock’ and carrying the self-styled title of ‘Supreme Commander’. Ross was a former soldier in the British army’s royal engineers. His father had been in the army and his grandfather had survived the battles of World War I only to die on the beaches of Dunkirk in World War II. Ross immigrated to Australia in the 1960s. In 1973, while watching John Wayne strut his stuff in a Western called The Comancheros, a light clicked on above Ross’s head. What a great name for a bike gang, he thought. By 1983 Ross had forty full members in his gang, and two chapters in Sydney. He’d also grown to be rather imperious and more militaristic. One gang member noted, ‘If I wanted to march around the fuckin’ backyard, I would have joined the fuckin’ army’.
Ross blamed new members of the Comancheros for the split. By his rules, adultery was not on, drugs were not on, and drinking exuberantly on a Saturday night was pretty normal. He observed: ‘Then new men came into the club with new ideas and new ways to make money. I just wanted to go away. I told them I just didn’t want to be there. They wanted to deal in drugs and they were taking each other’s women. They were breaking the rules I had running.’
The founder of the Bandidos in Australia was the former head of the Comancheros’ city chapter, Anthony Mark Spencer, known as ‘Snotgrass’. Like many of his compatriots in the United States, he was the product of a childhood spent in homeless children’s institutions and boys’ homes. He’d also had a brief stint in the navy. Spencer’s woes had been around for a while and early in 1983 he and some cohorts travelled to the United States where they’d ‘met Bandido members and were greatly impressed by their brotherhood and hospitality’. Spencer was also doing some shopping for Harley-Davidson parts which were still a bit scarce in Australia at the time. To form the Australian chapter, Spencer dealt directly with the then US Bandido chief Ronnie Hodge. The two met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ‘By giving us a charter in Australia, Ronnie Hodge paved the way for Bandidos International’, the Australian Bandidos proudly boasted.
The FBI held a rather different view. They thought the Bandidos’ new Australian chapter had been established, as one newspaper article noted, ‘to give the gang access to Australian chemicals, banned in the US, that could be used in the production of amphetamines’. Snotgrass wasn’t at all fazed about the FBI’s view of things, or their investigations into allegations that the Bandidos were responsible for the murder of a US federal judge and an assistant US attorney in San Antonio, Texas. Nor was he concerned about investigations into allegations that the Bandidos were gun-running into Lebanon, which was then being torn apart by war.
According to William Marsden and Julian Sher in Angels of Death:
What interested him was that the Bandidos specialized in exporting stolen and used bike parts and were eager to open a supply line to Australia. They had also started secret laboratories for manufacturing speed. Hodge suggested that the Comancheros patch over [or merge in] to the Bandidos and supply the US club with base chemicals, primarily methylamine P2P, just as the Angels were doing. In return, the Bandidos would teach their Aussie brethren how to cook crank [a form of methamphetamine that is usually snorted].
The reference to the Angels harked back to the work of the Melbourne-based ‘Speed King’, Peter John Hill. Hill was one of the original members of the Melbourne chapter of the Hells Angels, joining in 1972. Tattooed on his arm was his quirky version of Psalm 23: ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil because I am the evilist motherfucker who ever walked through the Valley.’ Peter must have a rather long arm. He also had a large slice of business acumen, and saw drugs as a very nice little earner, particularly if he controlled both manufacture and supply. In the late 1970s he pioneered the trade in Australia by heading to California and meeting up with the Hells Angels in Oakland. A former Shell Oil chemist, Kenny ‘Old Man’ Maxwell, was a dab hand at amphetamine manufacture and had passed his skills on to other club members who had become expert cooks. The star chefs included Jim Brandes, who would eventually find himself in a spot of bother in Australia, Sergei ‘Sir Gay’ Walton and Kenny ‘KO’ Owen.
When Hill made his visit, Sonny Barger, Walton, Brandes and Owen were up on RICO (racketeer influenced corrupt organizations) charges. The charges would later collapse. Walton was also in prison on weapons charges. The Angels needed cash to fund their defence, and Hill was nicely positioned to help. He visited Walton in prison and Walton handed over the family recipe. In return Hill shipped the vital ingredient P2P, then illegal in the United States but legal in Australia, to the boys in Oakland. In a display of patriotism the Australians shipped the P2P in three-litre cans of a national icon, Golden Circle pineapple juice. They simply drained the cans by making two small holes in the side, and refilled them with the chemical. An estimated three hundred litres were shipped by surface mail between 1980 and 1982. It was enough chemical to make about US$50 million worth of speed. In both the United States and Australia, the Bandidos saw this as a pretty good model for a profitable business. A few little extras among the bike parts stood a good chance of going unnoticed by the prying eyes of Australian Customs.
But the Bandidos start in Australia would soon become a bloodbath, even by Bandido standards. On 9 August 1984, with tensions running high between both gangs, three Comancheros were severely beaten by about fifty Bandidos at the Bull and Bush Hotel in Baulkham Hills in Sydney’s leafy north-west bible belt. Unfortunately for the Comancheros, the pub was a favourite of the Bandidos, and they didn’t take too kindly to the visit. Two days later, peace in our time was shattered by a declaration of war between the two gangs. Ground rules were laid down during a conversation between the rival presidents, including no approaches or assaults at the homes of gang members or in public places. War being war, these ground rules were completely and violently ignored by all, including the presidents.
Ross, arrogantly and in hindsight very foolishly, believed the Bandidos were scared of him. In an interview he observed:
They were on speed and speed brings paranoia. They had tried to flex their muscles in the Cross but they couldn’t make it so they