Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs (18 page)

‘Ow!’ gasped the old lady.

‘What’s up babe?’

‘I think that JCB might have caught me on the arm.’

Stopping off to check whether the glancing blow had done any damage, he found her right arm had been cleanly torn off at the shoulder. It had all happened so fast that she had felt nothing more than a hard pinch.

The inherent dangers of riding as part of a group cannot be underestimated. A brief lapse of concentration or a simple error of judgement can quickly lead to a mass pile-up. The density of the biker pack means that the consequences of any such accident are almost always catastrophic.

During the tenth anniversary ride of the San Diego-based Saddle Tramps MC, an oncoming vehicle lost control and ploughed into the heart of their formation. Four Saddle Tramps died and five more were seriously injured. Similarly, when members of the Brother Speed Motorcycle Club were riding en masse along the I-5 freeway in Oregon and traffic suddenly slowed down ahead of them, all hell broke loose. Three bikes crashed immediately and those behind couldn’t avoid the collision. In total twenty-six bikes were involved in the pile-up and there were dozens of serious injuries. Miraculously, only one club member died of his injuries.

One spring, after the usual boozing and brawling of their first run of the year, the Midland Outlaws decided to take the long way home, driving up through north Wales and across the Horseshoe Pass. It was raining as they made their way up the pass but this soon turned to sleet and then by
the time Boone and the others were on their way down the other side it had started to snow and conditions had become horrendous.

Of the twenty-eight Outlaws on the run, twenty-two came off their bikes on the way down the pass. Boone took a bend too fast for the conditions and skidded sideways into a tree. Link jumped off his bike and let it roll into a ditch, the only way he could possibly control it. Caz put his bike into top gear and used the clutch as a brake to descend the slope as slowly as possible. Halfway down, he heard a scream from behind: ‘Get out of the way, get out of the fucking way.’ Dozer had decided to do the whole thing at full speed and to the surprise of everyone made it safely to the bottom – they all found it hilarious.

As the weather started to improve, a spirit of mischievousness descended on the group. While riding in close formation, those who had already fallen off their bikes would attempt to kick those who hadn’t in order to make them do the same. In the meantime, those at the back of the line found themselves constantly dodging and weaving around the detritus – wing mirrors, passenger pegs, heat shields – that fell off the damaged bikes. Spirits were high. No one was seriously hurt and none of the bikes were seriously damaged. It was just another anecdote they could tell their friends at the next rally.

At the back of their minds though, every biker felt that it was only a matter of time before they got themselves into a proper accident. There was simply no way to predict who was going to be next or how badly hurt they would end up. So when the news came in March 1993 that Switch, Boone’s sergeant-at-arms, had come off his bike, the rest of the
Warwickshire chapter rushed to the hospital, bracing themselves for the worst.

Switch was lying on a bed at the far end of a busy ward, half propped up by a couple of pillows, looking battered and bruised, especially on his chest and legs where his bike seemed to have rolled over him after he crashed. He was clearly in a great deal of pain.

‘What on earth happened?’ asked Boone.

‘I dunno,’ came the reply, ‘I just came off. One minute I was going along, the next I was on the ground looking up at the sky.’

It made no sense. Switch wasn’t just a good rider; he was excellent, one of the most experienced in the club. He was also as tough as old boots, a former soldier who had been through multiple tours of Northern Ireland during the height of the troubles.

‘Did you hit something in the road?’ asked Caz.

Switch shook his head, grimacing from the pain.

‘Was there something wrong with the bike? Did you have a blowout?’

‘I don’t think so. I would have known. I just came off.’

The club members looked at one another, their foreheads crinkled with concentration.

‘Were you on a corner, was there oil on the road?’

‘Nah, I was in a straight line. The last thing I remember was being overtaken by a sports bike. After that I went down.’

Caz paused for a moment then, moving with a sense of urgency, made his way over to the other side of the bed and picked up the patches that the nurses had removed from their patient and placed over the back of a chair. He held
them up to the light. Two small holes were clearly visible through the leather fabric, one in the centre, the other higher and to the right.

‘Jesus, mate,’ gasped Caz, ‘you’ve been fucking shot. Twice.’

A doctor was quickly summoned and, with the aid of two nurses, gently turned Switch over in the bed to inspect his back. Having assumed that he had simply been the victim of a motorcycle accident they had focused on his more obvious injuries, never expecting there to be anything more.

As Switch growled with pain, his back was exposed and the two small bullet wounds, one in the shoulder, one closer to the centre of his lower back, were plain for all to see, even amid the large number of lacerations and bruises. ‘Looks like a .22,’ said Boone, ‘a real assassin’s weapon. Lucky they didn’t have anything bigger otherwise you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.’

The doctor, a middle-aged Indian man with small, round spectacles, turned to the group. ‘I’m afraid I will have to inform the police about this.’

At a signal from Caz, Boone pulled the curtains around Switch’s bed, isolating him from the rest of the ward. The nurses made themselves scarce while Caz stood face to face with the doctor, towering over him and invading his personal space.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I really should. These are gunshot wounds.’

‘Listen mate, there’s no law in this country that says you have to report this to anyone. It’s entirely your own discretion. I’m sure the police would like you to report it, but that
doesn’t mean you have to. And I’ll tell you one thing, if you even look like you’re going to report this, I’ll pick my mate up and we’ll walk out of here right now and whatever happens to him will be on your conscience forever. And if anything bad happens, all of us lot are going to hold you personally responsible. You understand?’

The doctor looked at each of the faces of the bikers surrounding the bed and saw that they were deadly serious. He also knew that they were right about the law (reporting of gunshot wounds by doctors was not made compulsory in the UK until 2004), which left him with no options. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll just treat him. Nothing more.’

As the bikers left the hospital, the conversation quickly turned to figuring out who might have been responsible for the hit. There was only ever going to be one set of suspects: the Hell’s Angels.

The Angels were still reeling from the murder of a senior member of their Wolverhampton Chapter some months earlier. Back in early October 1992, three Hell’s Angels – Andrew Trevis, Stephen Pollock and vice-president Michael ‘Long Mick’ Rowledge – were sitting in a car outside a shopping centre in Aintree, Liverpool when, out of nowhere, a young black man ran over, reached in through the open window and, at point blank range, pumped four bullets from a handgun into Rowledge’s chest.

The assassin wore no mask and made no attempt to disguise his identity – he escaped by jumping into the passenger seat of a black XR3i Cabriolet, which sped off to the south. Shocked and traumatised by what they had witnessed, Pollock and Trevis fled the scene.

Rowledge, a father of two, had been a high-profile target for any hit. Knives and coshes were found in the back of the car so it seemed clear that the trio had been expecting trouble, only to find they had bitten off more than they could chew.

Throughout the MC world, the motive for the shooting seemed obvious, as did those behind it: the Midland Outlaws, the only MC in the country that had at least two black members. In the hours that followed, confusion reigned and even the Midland Outlaws wondered if the execution had been carried out by members of a rogue chapter within their club, acting without authorisation. An emergency meeting was called to find out what was going on and members were told to observe strict security protocols in case of reprisals.

The assumption was that Rowledge’s assassination was revenge for the shooting in Albert Road where three Cycle Tramps had been injured six months earlier. Nine Hell’s Angels had been arrested, and after a lengthy police investigation, one of the Wolverhampton Angels had just been charged with four counts of attempted murder. Almost as fast as the revenge theory was formed, however, it fell apart. For one thing, it would be highly unusual for a pre-arranged battle to take place in Liverpool – at that time, neutral turf. And while Rowledge and Trevis were both from Wolverhampton, Pollock was a member of the Windsor chapter.

As detectives discovered, the shooting had nothing to do with inter-gang rivalries, and everything to do with a violently disputed drug deal. The Angels had been called in to collect a £140,000 debt from one of Liverpool’s top
family firms who had purchased cannabis from a veteran Dutch trafficker (and old Hell’s Angel) named Lars.

Threatening phone calls, leaning on associates, unannounced visits to offices – the standard debt collectors’ fare was meted out, but to no avail. Further warnings passed between the two groups for a few days before the Angels arranged to drive up to Merseyside for a surprise visit and show that they meant business. Witnesses at the shopping centre reported seeing a carload of ‘biker types’ on one side of the street having an animated argument with a group of men parked opposite, before both cars drove off. The next time the Angels saw any of the Liverpool gang was the moment that Rowledge was shot.

Once confirmation came that the murder was nothing to do with the biker world, Boone and his comrades found themselves amused at much of the press coverage that followed. One article in particular implied that the Cycle Tramps – who in any case no longer existed – wanted nothing more than to join their rivals. ‘Though they yearn for membership of a Hell’s Angel chapter, their behaviour is deemed not up to scratch,’ it said.

‘I think they might have that a bit wrong there,’ laughed Caz.

But the Angels were not laughing. As if the formation of the Midland Outlaws hadn’t made them look bad enough, the murder of Rowledge had further dented their reputation in the UK. The time had come for them to strike back.

‘I think I know who might have shot Switch’ said Link. ‘The bike that he described, it sounds like it belongs to this Angel who was doing time when I was. He and his brother are in
the 81, and they’re a couple of psychos. This is just the sort of thing they’d get up to.’

The next topic up for discussion was exactly what the Midland Outlaws were going to do about it, but that would have to wait for the next church meeting. What was clear was that the club wouldn’t take this lying down. They were going to fight fire with fire. As Boone rode home from the hospital, the chorus line from a Sex Pistols song kept running through his head: ‘Oh you silly thing, you’ve really gone and done it now.’

The idea was to plan a revenge attack, but as it happened the club barely had time to catch its breath before the next strike came. Link was on his way to the Rock and Blues festival, driving a Range Rover and towing a large caravan full of supplies for the show, when a couple of Hell’s Angels jumped out on him from around the blind corner of a country lane.

They had chosen their ambush spot well. The only place for Link to go was straight up the steep hill towards the town of Ripley, but with his non-turbo vehicle and its heavy load, he struggled to build up any speed, even with his foot flat to the floor.

He could only bob back and forth, urging the car to go faster, and watch in horror as one of the rival bikers produced what appeared to be a semi-automatic assault rifle, took aim and sent a stream of hot lead flying towards him. Glass shattered and metal ripped as the neat line of bullet holes appeared along the side of both the car and the caravan. It was a miracle Link avoided being hit. He breached the hill and drove straight into the campsite, eager to tell his fellow club members what had just taken place.

It didn’t end there. Members of the Midland Outlaws found themselves being ambushed at petrol stations by teams of Angels who would leap out and pound them with pick axe handles. Others were jumped on their way to or from their clubhouses and a few ended up with serious stab or even axe wounds. By now, Boone and his comrades had started hitting back, giving as good as they got in many cases by arranging similar ambushes and attacks at places they knew that the Hell’s Angels would be. These included petrol stations, approach roads to clubhouses and, on at least one occasion, one of the exit routes from the Bulldog Bash.

The Angels made no secret of the fact that they were trying to scare the new gang out of existence, but their tactics had the opposite effect, making them stronger and more determined to survive. Still, the Midland Outlaws were very much hampered by a lack of effective weaponry and because of that felt constantly on the defensive. What they really needed were some guns.

The Hell’s Angels had firearms by the bucket load, but they had been around far longer and had made far greater inroads into the criminal underworld, partly as a result of their drug dealing networks and extra-curricular work as debt collectors and security guards. When it came to getting their hands on hardware, they were long-toothed veterans.