Chopper Unchopped (87 page)

SOME of the so-called outlaw motorcycle gangs have been identified by Australian law enforcement agencies as prime examples of sophisticated organised crime groups
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Police, through Operation Wing Clipping, identified the Hell’s Angels as a major influence in the production and distribution of amphetamines in the 1980s
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In 1982 a police task force, Omega Two, found a Hell’s Angels amphetamines factory in Wattle Glen, known as Greenslopes
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The factory was potentially capable of producing 22.5 kilos of high quality amphetamines a week. Four trials and five years later, four of the Angels were found guilty of producing amphetamines
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At one point a US Hell’s Angel hit man, James Paton Brandes, arrived in Melbourne, but was apprehended after police were told that he had arrived to kill one of the Omega team
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According to an FBI report on outlaw motorcycle gangs, ‘The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle gang has become a highly professional, sophisticated organisation involved in criminal activities including the acquisition and infiltration of legitimate businesses to launder the immense profits gained from illicit drug dealings’
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SOMEHOW I got myself involved in motorcycle club politics when I became friendly with various characters in Tassie, and I have paid the price.

However, it wasn’t the first time. That is one of my big problems. I don’t seem to learn from my mistakes. Many years ago, the man who could have run the Melbourne underworld before he lost interest, Mad Charlie, ended up connected with the Melbourne chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club.

It is a matter which embarrassed the rough, tough bikers no end. According to rumor it involved the kidnapping of the Hell’s Angels speed amphetamine cook and the bashing of two high-ranking Hell’s Angels outside a Melbourne nightclub.

The affair is, of course, only rumor, and the Angels would no doubt deny it. Certainly no action was ever taken against Mad Charlie. The fact that Charlie could probably muster a dozen of Melbourne’s most noted nut cases with more guns than God at a moment’s notice, may have had something to do with it.

I had a small falling out with an Italian heroin dealer named Tony Zampaglione, a would-be mafia type. He got around A Division of Pentridge with his brother Sam and a Hell’s Angels bodyguard named ‘Jock’.

I had to give Tony a foot up the backside on a matter of prison protocol and the Hell’s Angel handed in his resignation about ten seconds later. Meanwhile, I was maintaining close contact with one of the most powerful Hell’s Angels in the country, a man I call the ‘Lawyer’, and various other members of the club who had considerable influence on a national level.

Yet my disregard of Zampaglione and his friendship with various members of the Melbourne chapter of the Angels, and my friendship with Mad Charlie, who, according to rumor, had embarrassed the Melbourne chapter greatly, forced me unwillingly into the shadowy world of biker politics.

In 1987 I had arranged with my own contacts in the Hell’s Angels to back them in an internal blood war that seemed likely to happen. It was all to do with a power struggle within the club. The war never took place and my help was never needed. But it became known that I was the ace in the hole for one side in a bikie war.

However, for this and other reasons my name is not popular in the ranks of the Melbourne Chapter of the Angels. To add insult to bloody injury, Mad Charlie introduced me to a beautiful big-bosomed blonde glamor girl named Melissa.

Melissa and myself became great and good friends and are still friendly to this day. However, in 1987 Melissa was also the much loved and jealously guarded girlfriend of ‘Ballbearing’, the President of the Melbourne chapter of the Angels.

Ballbearing was part of the internal power struggle that involved my old friend and comrade ‘the Lawyer’, so the plot thickened. The set-up is the way the game is played and I must admit that I always feared a set-up from the Angels, as they had the cold cash power and connections to set any one up in those days. However, old friends high up in the Angels told me not to worry.

The Hell’s Angels, unlike other bike clubs, are businessmen. It may not be the Melbourne Club but it is just about as powerful and a lot more harmful to your health. The Angels is no longer a bike club, it is a multi-national conglomerate. They are not petty people and they know mindless wars are bad for business. Self-defence they will agree to, but no-one was going to bother trying to kill me because I was close, in a platonic way, naturally, to the president’s girl.

Melissa is no longer with Ballbearing and lives happily a long way from Melbourne by the beach in the sun. But the spider’s web of shadows involved in biker politics is mind numbing and still hangs over me. But I am close to figuring out the spider’s web in relation to myself and certain people. Or certain person.

WHO shot the idiot who got me into this mess and why is no longer a mystery to me, but to understand why he gave Crown evidence against me and tossed my name into the ring I must explain biker politics.

First, you have to know that the backbone of all the main players in the biker gangs of this country and overseas is drugs.

Overseas it’s cocaine and methamphetamine. However, in Australia it is 100 per cent methamphetamine. The bike gangs introduced it to Australia and to this day control its manufacture. The Angels are at the top of the bike world in Australia. The Angels membership is small and elite. It is not the largest club in Australia, but by far the richest and the most powerful.

There are two sorts of biker clubs: those affiliated with the Angels and those which are not. The club with the closest affiliation with the Angels is the Coffin Cheaters. Then there is the Outlaws, an American club with power in America that runs close and in some ways rivals the Hell’s Angels, but in Australia it is not a large club.

The Outlaws have mainland chapters in Victoria and are growing fast, and have no affiliation with the Angels. The Outlaws do, however, have an affiliation with the Black Uhlans MC, a large and powerful mainland club. The idiot I mentioned above fell out with the Outlaws and was no longer their president and when I was getting around with him his best friend and right-hand man was Black Uhlans Larry, a former president of the NSW chapter of the Black Uhlans.

Yet while the idiot had fallen out with the Tasmanian chapter of the Outlaws, he maintained a close friendship with ‘Doughnut’, a member of the Victorian chapter of the Outlaws.

Now the Outlaws and the Hell’s Angels had no affiliation whatsoever, in fact in some quarters there was almost a warlike feeling between the two. Interestingly, the bloke I’m talking about was most welcome at the Satan’s Riders clubhouse in Launceston. And yet the Satan’s Riders and the Outlaws were not very friendly and, unlike the Outlaws, the Satan’s Riders had a loose affiliation with the Hell’s Angels.

I found the fact that this bloke got on well with a club that was affiliated with the Angels most odd, as the Black Uhlans, his protectors, had no affiliation with the Angels.

The same matter was raised at my trial. There is no way in the world, in my opinion, that he would have given Crown evidence against anyone, let alone false Crown evidence without the silent approval of one of the bike gangs. Even though he has broken the code by giving evidence it appears he is still accepted for some strange reason by some biker clubs in Tassie who should know better. Wouldn’t it be funny if, in time to come, I was to find out that this particular person gave evidence against me just because I was suspected of getting on too well with the wrong girl in 1987? It wouldn’t be the first time a seemingly harmless friendship led to serious consequences.

Fact is most certainly stranger than fiction. Food for thought.

Forgive me for rambling on about this, but the mystery of why the fool gave evidence against me will haunt me until I solve the puzzle. To do what he did would mean that he would have to have the blessing of at least one bike club. I am not a member of any bike club, but during my years in Pentridge I befriended some powerful members of powerful bike gangs.

I have contacts in the biker world from Australia to Oakland, California, simple friendships that I have maintained. These friendships allow me a certain insight, but no one man will ever know all about the interconnected, almost incestuous, love-hate friendships and rivalries that exist within the motorcycle gang world.

If you add drugs and money to the spider’s web of biker politics you have total insanity. I tumbled my way into this maze without really meaning to do so and if I ever get out of this jail I have no intention of tumbling into it again.

To give you another example of the spider web: there I am in 1987 meeting with one of the most powerful members of the Hell’s Angels in Australia, being consulted in relation to the internal power struggle in the Victorian chapter. The idea was to contract work out to outsiders to solve internal problems. Meaning that some Hell’s Angels were arranging to have other Hell’s Angels killed because they themselves couldn’t kill their own brothers within the club and still maintain their positions, respect and authority. It was a political power struggle to gain financial control. And it was resolved without bloodshed and I and others were never called upon as previously agreed.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned, I was seeing the girlfriend of the president of the Melbourne chapter.

Later, in Tasmania in 1992, Cracker Phillips and myself and the nitwit were invited to drink at the fortress-like clubhouse of the Satan’s Riders in Launceston.

The Satan’s Riders did not get along with the Outlaws, who in turn didn’t get along too well with the Hobart-based Devil’s Henchmen club either.

The Devil’s Henchmen didn’t get along too well with Black Uhlans Larry, right-hand man to the other bloke I was with. Yet once inside the Satan’s Riders clubhouse, there he was with members of the Satan’s Riders MC and a member of the Devil’s Henchmen all in secret conversation – while Cracker Phillips and my good self drank with other members of the club trying to pinpoint just who was on whose side and who was really loyal to who. It was a nightmare as these people play the smiling face politics, a game I know a great deal about.

However, in the biker world many men within many clubs are all playing the smiling treachery game and in the end, in spite of my contacts in this scene, I am a fish out of water. The bike gangs avoid blood wars and feuds with members of the mainstream underworld for the same reason – they are fish out of water. And the mainstream criminal world tries to avoid blood feuds with the biker world.

The drugs and money join the two together, but neither side trusts the other totally as they are of two different worlds. So for me to ever find out the truth about the whole shooting fiasco is probably something I will never do, and in the end I only have myself to blame.

I BEG to make a small postscript to my previous remarks in relation to that stalwart body of men, the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, and their on-again, off-again president, Mr Christopher Gerald Coelho, alias ‘Ballbearing’. I think I should make it perfectly clear once more that I was in no way involved in any conspiracy to murder the good Mr Coelho, or anyone else connected with the Hell’s Angels.

Perish the thought. The people I was dealing with were trying to do everything in their power to avoid having to kill any member of their own club. I simply agreed to lend a helping hand should a helping hand be required. The Lawyer and his cohorts spoke in riddles and I suspect they were partaking of speed, and were a touch paranoid. They believed that there was a small handful of club members, Ballbearing being one, that might have needed sorting out. The Lawyer and his brothers in plots and plans were doing everything in their power to avoid trouble and pull the club together.

So it was in fact a conspiracy not to murder. Talking to the Hell’s Angels is akin to talking to the KGB. I was asked to be at the ready to hit and hit hard. They wanted an attack from outside the club so as to even scores, and at the same time pull the whole club together against a common enemy.

The theory was that any action I might take would be blamed on others, such as another motorcycle club involved in the methamphetamine industry. It was very involved.

There I was in the back of a hire car limousine with a Hell’s Angel wearing a three-piece suit and two others in leathers and full colors wearing their patches, snorting speed as the limo drove around and around St Kilda.

Two of them were off their faces at a thousand miles per hour. I was half pissed as always and The Lawyer was brilliant, but semi-mad.

I got the impression that in order to call a halt to the civil war that was raging within the club, the thinking was that if one, two or three of its members were killed – such as, for instance, Ballbearing, Vinnie and Jaw – and their deaths were blamed on another club, it would end all internal hostilities and pull the club together.

The problem was knowing which way Ray Hamment would jump, as he was very close to Bearing and not a total fool, and a powerful and respected member of the club. And he was in prison at the time, which was a problem.

Ray could be fixed from behind prison walls, but that would prove professional criminal or mainstream underworld involvement and not another club. It was all very KGB.

It went from plots to kill to plans for peace. Phone calls to America, the whole box and dice, all mixed with heads full of speed. I was starting to wonder why I’d even been called in, unless it was to kill me after I’d killed others.

I agreed to help if needed – in the name of old friendship – yet agreed on nothing specific. It was more thinking out loud using me as a strategic and tactical sounding board. Then it all vanished.

The message was, ‘She’s sweet, Chopper. We’ll handle it.’ And that was that. I agreed to kill no-one. I’d like to make that perfectly clear. As I said before, the politics of the motorcycle gang world is a spider’s web of shadows. The buggers have more twists and turns than the Freemasons. Ha ha ha.