Enforcer (22 page)

Snoddy rang me later that night to tell me what had happened.

‘Whaddya think’ll come of this?’ he asked me.

‘We’ll just have to sit back and see.’

I
T DIDN’T
take long to find out. Chop, Louie and Charlie were at the clubhouse one night in July 1984, pulling cones in the second-floor kitchen which faced down onto Louisa Road. Next thing they knew, bullets were flying through the wall, which was only made out of a thin ply. They raced to the window and saw that it was Foghorn and Sparra. The only damage done was to a small room at the back of the house which was made out of fibro. Some shotgun pellets had gone through the walls and a high-powered rifle bullet had hit some brickwork.

The neighbours called the cops, but when they turned up, Chop told them he didn’t know what they were talking about. Outlaw clubs just don’t go to the coppers because you know they’re not going to do anything except try and lock someone up. The coppers like to think of themselves as the biggest club in the country, and when they run into a bunch of blokes who won’t abide by their laws they don’t like it.

About two nights later, there was a second shooting at Louisa Road. There was no more damage, but the neighbours called the cops again.

We’d always known Jock wouldn’t fight us head on; too many of us could fight. Our front line was like bulldozers and the others were a pretty handy back-up. You didn’t find blokes like that at bike shops.

It was clear Jock would just continue taking sneaky pot shots at us.

W
E USED
to go to the Royal Oak at North Parramatta fairly often – even though it was in Como territory – because one of our members, Lout, was the manager there. One night Lout was alone at work when all of a sudden Jock, Leroy and another Como walked into the bar. Jock was carrying on about how there weren’t going to be any Bandidos in Parramatta. He was making a big statement out of it: here they were, three Comos unafraid to stroll into a Bandit pub.

That was the extent of it and Lout duly told us what had gone on. But later that night I got a call from Leroy, who kept in touch even though he was still a Como. He told me that in fact he, Jock and the third Como hadn’t been alone when they walked into the pub. He said Jock had the entire Comanchero club sitting up around the corner in a side street. He had a member standing out on the street watching the pub, and if one of them had stepped out and given the signal, the entire club was going to charge in.

We filled the club in on the details at the next meeting night, and on the following Saturday, club night, we left the old ladies at Louisa Road with a couple of prospects while we rode into Parramatta. We cruised around, revved the bikes, stopped at just about every pub there. Then we cruised up to the Royal Oak, where we spent a couple of hours. We didn’t see a single Comanchero, but we’d done what we’d gone to do. We could make statements too.

A
BOUT TWO
weeks after the blue at the Bull & Bush, Snoddy called everyone and told us to come to the clubhouse. He had something important to say.

Once all the members had arrived, we gathered in the pool room where we held our meetings and Snoddy made his announcement. Jock had rung him to declare war on the club.

It might have been funny if it wasn’t so serious.

Snoddy said he’d told Jock it was bullshit and that the two of them should just settle it between them, one on one.

Jock wouldn’t be in it.

Snoddy had also offered him the option of the two sergeants fighting.

‘You’d love that, wouldn’t ya,’ Jock had said. ‘A punch-up man on man. You know you’d wipe us out. Nuh, this is going to be guerilla warfare. There’s no rules. You won’t know when we’re going to hit you or where.’

Snoddy said Jock had continued to rattle on – ‘You know I’m the supreme commander . . . We’re not gunna stop till we wipe you out . . .’ – until Snoddy got sick of it and hung up on him.

We spent the rest of the night talking about what Jock would do next. I thought he’d sit back and build up his club, taking in anybody on two wheels, and that he wouldn’t strike until he had about fifty blokes. Others disagreed. I almost got myself killed finding out that they were right.

A
BOUT THREE
days after war was declared, I decided to go for a ride into Parramatta by myself to see if any Comos tried pulling me up. If they did, I was going to bash them and take their colours. Unfortunately, while I was out looking for them, I think they were out looking for me. I only got as far as Five Dock, about three kilometres from home, when a little white Jap car pulled up alongside me on Parramatta Road. I recognised Foghorn and Sparra with another Como I’d never seen before. I tried to pull ahead but all of a sudden they swerved at me. I tried putting my leg out to stop their car hitting the bike, but the bike went down and suddenly I was underneath it, sliding along at a fair speed towards the gutter, trying to hold the bike up so it didn’t get too badly damaged.

I was in big trouble, but it was my lucky day. I missed the gutter and bounced up the driveway of a car yard instead, the bike on top of me and petrol pouring from the tank. I came to a stop and felt okay but I couldn’t lift the bike off. This dopey car salesman was standing there with all these other dudes in suits: ‘Are you hurt?’ Not one of the stupid pricks tried pulling the bike off. A young bloke riding past on his pushy stopped and tried to lift the bike off me. It was too heavy for him but he took enough of the weight for me to leverage my leg and push it off. I got it up onto its stand, grabbed the car yard hose and washed the bike off before washing myself down. I straightened the handlebars, checked the bike, then got back on and rode home.

I was straight on the blower to Snoddy and told him it was on. With that, Snoddy called a meeting. Everyone turned up and I told them what had happened, warning them to be careful.

Someone asked, ‘D’ya think he’s gunna keep going like this? Will running you off the road even up for the Bull & Bush?’

‘The Bull & Bush was us evening up for Junior,’ Snoddy said. ‘I think Jock’ll carry on with it. But just like when we were riding with him, he won’t do nothing himself. He’ll send the others out to do the dirty work and he’ll sit back in the clubhouse.’

Over the next few weeks the war intensified, and there was a lot of bashing. It was mainly us doing the bashings, though; Jock’s lot tended to stick to trying to run us off the road in their cars and sneaking up on our clubhouse.

Bongo Snake was riding out at Rosehill on Parramatta Road, not far from their clubhouse, when Leroy in a ute and another carload of them ran him off the road. As with me, his bike ended up on top of him and they gave him a bit of a going-over with baseball bats. Then they did what most bikers would never do – they smashed his bike. Dumped it on top of him and left.

About four days after Bongo Snake was bashed, the back window of my car was shot out in the driveway alongside my house. To me, this was a real low act because it was at my home, endangering Donna and the kids.

The next day I rocked up to their clubhouse at Rosehill and banged on the door but there was no one there. I left a Bandit card with a message on the back that if anyone came near my home again the gloves’d be off and I’d be making house calls myself.

Then we got a visit from the cops. They had a warrant to search our clubhouse for guns. They said the Comanchero clubhouse had been shot up and we were their suspects. It was bullshit. We hadn’t shot them up. They’d obviously done it themselves to set us up and have the cops confiscate any weapons we might have. We didn’t even have any at the club. In those days, guns weren’t a regular part of bike club life.

***

A
ROUND THIS
time, Jock got knocked off his bike by a small truck. I always knew he was going to get into an accident because he had such bad night vision with those thick glasses.

This incident apparently happened in the late afternoon, early evening. For some reason, a couple of cars had broken down at a set of lights on Marsden Road just after he’d gone through, holding up all the traffic. Then another car broke down at the other end of the road. Where this truck came from I don’t know. It just appeared, apparently. I always thought Jock probably just ran into it. But he seemed to think the truck had tried to run him over. If it had it would have saved a lot of problems, but whoever was driving the truck made the wrong decision and swerved around him.

I
F ANY
good was coming out of the war, it was that I was starting to see who the real hard-core blokes in the club were and who was just along for the ride. Take Davo for example. He took it upon himself to do what I’d done and go out to the Comos clubhouse to front Jock. He’d known Jock a long time and obviously thought he could talk some sense into him. Jock wasn’t there but he fronted Leroy and Sunshine. When he came back and told me what he’d done I thought, While we’ve got staunch members like Davo, this club will keep going.

Through all this, Sheepskin and Leroy kept calling me on the phone to see how I was going. Sometimes I’d call them. We knew that if we ran into each other on the street it would be a punch-on because our clubs were at war, but on a personal level we were still friends.

Leroy and Sheepskin would keep me posted on what the Comos where up to. They never gave me any information that might have helped us beat them, but if there was something that they thought didn’t really matter, or if they felt it was the right thing to do, they’d give me a tingle. They didn’t like the way their club was going about the war. Equally, if some Comos got bashed they’d ring and ask me what the go was. It helped stop the two clubs really blowing up.

In one call I got from Leroy in August he told me that the whole club had been told to get me. He wasn’t being threatening. Just letting me know.

He said that Jock had some T-shirts made up with my picture printed on them. On one batch there was a hammer pointed at my head with the words
Hammer Caesar
, and on the other batch there was a big nail going into my head with the words
Nail Caesar
.

Leroy also told me about a stunt the Comos pulled one Saturday night when we were out with our old ladies. He said that after we’d left the clubhouse for our club ride, the Comos had a car with a CB radio follow us to the pub. They waited until we left to return home and radioed ahead to Foghorn, who was parked in his ute with Snowy and some other blokes back at Louisa Road. Foghorn and Snowy then poured a forty-four gallon drum of diesel on the road where they knew we would come flying down the hill into a big sweeping left-hand turn. They were hoping to bring the whole club down on top of each other, old ladies and all. They didn’t give a fuck if old ladies got hurt. As it turned out, we rode straight over it without even noticing.

The diesel plan wasn’t a bad idea. I probably would have done it myself if it had been only blokes that you were going to take out. Leroy had a real soft spot for Donna and didn’t like the idea that she could have been killed, which is why he told me about it.

Things were getting pretty nasty when one day Sheepskin rang. ‘Can I come over to your place – without getting bashed? There’s something serious I need to talk over with you. You’ve got no worries with me. You’ve got me word. All I wanna do is talk.’

‘Yeah, all right.’

So he came over and he had this tall, well-built bloke with him who he introduced to me as his prospect, Pappy.

‘Ceese,’ he said, getting straight down to business, ‘I’ve left the Comos and Pappy’s left with me.’

‘Why?’

‘I got put between a rock and a hard place.’ He said that Jock had come to him and told him that he had to put a hit on me and a hit on Shadow. Sheepskin was really close to both of us. He said he asked Jock why he wanted me and Shadow bumped off rather than Snoddy. ‘Snoddy’s the president,’ he’d said. ‘Why wouldn’t you want him knocked off?’

Jock had said it was me who held the club together and that if I went, the only one who’d step into my spot would be Shadow. ‘If we get rid of both of them, the Band-Aids will fall to pieces.’ They called us Band-Aids.

‘I didn’t even have to think about it,’ Sheepskin told me. ‘I was willing to get into a fist fight with youse for the sake of the Comos but there’s no way I was gunna off ya. I’ve known youse too long. And anyway, I knew if I missed the first time, there wouldn’t be no second chance.’ So Sheepskin said that he turned round to Jock and told him no way. If it was a choice between that or the club, he was leaving. So he left and Pappy went with him.

He said he and Leroy had been trying to end the war but he could see things were about to explode; Foghorn and Snowy were always in Jock’s ear telling him how great he was, feeding his ego, and trying to egg him on to do more.

He admitted to me that the Comos had got a couple of prospects to shoot up their own clubhouse. They fired a few harmless shots into a garage door then Jock rang the cops to say the Bandidos had just driven past and shot at them.

Sheepskin got up to go. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d just come over and tell ya so you can watch your back and you can let Shadow know that there’s a contract out on him too.’

Pappy added, ‘Sheepskin’s right. You wanna watch your back. They’ve got these T-shirts out now with your face on ’em.’