Gangs (27 page)

‘You’ve got to be able to fight or you’re not going to get anywhere. Your face has to fit. All that stuff about biting the heads off chickens, eating dogs and the like, some of it used to happen but it was never club policy. The hardest part is knowing how to deal with having a family. You always have to put the club first.

‘It’s a real commitment. You can’t hold down a full-time job, because if the club needs you and calls on you, you have to be there. Most of the members will be self-employed because that gives them the flexibility they need. If you’re single, you’re expected to be there most evenings and weekends. If you have kids, you might get away with just the weekend but you’d still be expected to be around for any important meetings, etc. Or if there is a big party, you shame the club if you don’t make it along.’

As for the criminality, in particular the links to drug-trafficking, Colin says it is an open secret within the biking world that members of the Angels and other gangs are heavily involved. ‘You have to remember that when it comes to the Angels, the organisation is basically controlled from America. The guys here might say they are not the same and, in many ways, they are a few years behind, but if America says jump, they all jump and know that if they don’t, they’re gonna get kicked out.

‘When you look at the Angels in America, in Canada and across Europe, the evidence of their involvement in drug-trafficking is absolutely fucking overwhelming. A lot of the money that gets made is funnelled back to the US and that’s what keeps it ticking over. The British Angels have to do their part. Most of the legwork is done by the prospects and hang-arounds so it never gets back to the club, they just keep a cut of the profits.’

Colin lights a cigarette as he casts his mind back to his own time as a prospect. His voice grows quiet as he tells me he did some things he was ashamed of, things that he would now rather not talk about.

‘The whole point of being a prospect is that you have to do what you are told and that’s how you show commitment. It doesn’t matter how stupid, how insane or how distasteful the thing is, you have to do it and you can’t question it. I know one guy, a former member of the Satan’s Slaves, who decided to join the Angels. He did everything that was asked of him and finally they said they would allow him in on one more condition. He had to square it with the Slaves.

‘The Angels insisted it would be okay but of course it wasn’t. The Slaves put him in hospital for six months and when he came out the Angels gave him a patch. I know of cases where the Angels have been beating the shit out of some biker, two or three of them on one, and at the end because the guy has put up a good fight, they’ve offered him a patch too.

‘Whenever there is trouble or something to be done, it’s usually the prospects who are first to get involved. Sometimes it’s because they are told to but more often it’s because they volunteer. They know if they do something good for the club, it means they are more likely to get their patch sooner.

‘When you go to something like the Bulldog Bash, you’ve got pretty much everyone in the biker fraternity all in one place, from the rich white-collar workers on their Harleys to despatch riders to the back-patch club members. It’s hard to believe there is any tension but, of course, there always is. There are tensions and there are political pressures. Outsiders don’t realise the ties and commitments members have to each other, it’s like family but more so. And what would you do if someone messed with members of your family?

‘The Bulldog Bash may be one of the most peaceful big events around, but that hides a lot of problems. So far as the Angels are concerned, there is always a war to be fought somewhere.’

 

No one can remember quite how it began and few can recall exactly what it was all about but, by the early 1990s, the vicious fighting between the Wolverhampton chapter of the Hells Angels and the Birmingham club known as the Cycle Tramps had reached its bloody peak. There had been literally dozens of assaults, numerous stabbings, the odd shooting and a number of mass rumbles in which huge groups of both gangs would rush one another, armed with motorbike chains, baseball bats and meat cleavers. Many predicted the Cycle Tramps – the only remaining outlaw gang in Birmingham – would soon be extinct.

Biker battles were nothing new in the West Midlands. A few years earlier the Pagans and the Ratae had fought a bitter six-day war that started with a series of raids by Pagans on members of the Ratae deemed to be living on their territory. Two days later more than thirty members of the Ratae and reinforcements from Humberside and Norfolk drove in twelve vans to the Pagans’ headquarters in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and laid siege. After a brief stand-off the quiet street was engulfed in flames as both sides threw petrol bombs and the clubhouse began to burn. Shotgun blasts rang out and a team of Ratae ‘commandos’ made a frontal assault, firing a gun through the front door before storming the building. The first two to enter made it only as far as the hall before they were beaten back by knife- and sword-wielding Pagans. One was scalped Red Indian-style, while the other was stabbed in the neck. Both were dragged to safety by other Ratae and the rest of the gang hastily withdrew. By the time the police arrived they met an ail-too familiar response: no one had seen or heard anything.

Three days later the Pagans visited Brackley, Northamptonshire, and attacked the home of the then vice-president of the Ratae, who managed to keep his attackers at bay using repeated blasts of a .410 shotgun. One of the attackers fired back with a weapon of his own, but accidentally hit fellow Pagan Stephen ‘the Rabbi’ Brookes, killing him instantly. Nine Pagans were eventually convicted of manslaughter; eight Ratae were convicted of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.

But in early 1993 a delegation of bikers from the Cycle Tramps, visited first the Pagans, then the Ratae. Exactly what was said has never been made public but within the space of a few hours the rifts of the past seemed to have been forgotten. Representatives of all three clubs then travelled to Derby to visit another gang: the Road Tramps. At the time the Road Tramps ran the Rock and Blues Custom show held each summer and it was the largest event of its kind in the Midlands. The show has been going since 1983 and is well respected in the biker community as well as a solid money-spinner. The Road Tramps, like the Cycle Tramps, had been involved in a long-running dispute with the Wolverhampton Angels, who had expressed a considerable interest in taking over the Rock and Blues Custom show, with or without the Road Tramps’ blessing.

A few weeks before the opening of the July 1992 show, Derbyshire police received a tip-off that the Hells Angels would mount an attack at some point during the proceedings. The police promptly forbade the Road Tramps to allow any Angels on to the site and unwittingly cleared the way for the most crucial development of the biker war to proceed unhindered.

A few hours after the show had opened, members of the Road Tramps, Cycle Tramps Pagans, Ratae and several other gangs, including the Stafford Eagles and the Road Runners, appeared and slipped on new jackets. Emblazoned on the back were colours that no one had ever seen before. The logo was a skull with a kind of Indian headdress made up of different-coloured feathers. One was blue and white – the colours of the Pagans. Another was red and blue, the Road Tramps, and yet another red and yellow, the Cycle Tramps. There were seven feathers in all, each representing a different gang. The rivals had come together to form a brand new gang: the Midland Outlaws.

In August, a week after the show, there was a bungled attempt to nip the new alliance in the bud. A former member of the Cycle Tramps narrowly avoided death after answering a knock on his front door. As he walked down the hall, someone pushed the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun through the letterbox and fired. He survived and was later rehoused for his own safety.

Two weeks later at the Bulldog Bash, two Angels kidnapped a member of a neutral outlaw gang who was known to be friendly with members of the Midland Outlaws. He was tortured until he told everything he knew about their reasons for formation and their plans for the future. The Angels, it seemed, were running scared.

And with good reason. On an international scale, the second largest biker gang after the Hells Angels is known as the Outlaws. With upwards of forty chapters, mostly in America and Australia, they have a no-nonsense motto – ‘God forgives, Outlaws don’t’ – and wear colours that are a close copy of those worn by Marlon Brando in
The Wild One,
depicting a skull sitting above a pair of crossed pistons.

Although for the most part the two clubs leave one another alone, there has been bad blood between them since 1974 when three Angels were murdered by two Outlaws in Chicago. Periodic violence has flared up ever since. The Midland Outlaws, it seemed, were ‘prospecting’ to join the ranks of one of the Angels’ worst enemies. Throughout the biker world, the talk was not so much of whether the Midland Outlaws would launch an attack as of when it would be.

For a club to join
en masse
it must prove itself ‘worthy’ of wearing the colours. Exactly what this proof entails is not known, though past experience shows that a major attack or act of violence will often suffice. The Rowdies Motorcycle Club in Trondheim, for example, spent ten years hoping to be granted a charter to enable them to become the first Hells Angels in Norway. Then, one July, they launched a vicious knife and chain attack on a rival club, putting several of its members in hospital. Two weeks later the Rowdies received their Angels patches.

But then another gang came into the frame. The following summer Interpol tracked the movement of dozens of members of the third biggest of the international back-patch gangs – the Texas-based Bandidos – entering Britain and visiting members of the Midlands Outlaws. The Bandidos are one of the world’s fastest-growing outlaw clubs, whose battles with their rivals have been characterised by extreme acts of violence. Sometimes referred to as Bandido Nation, their colours depict a gun- and machete-toting Mexican cartoon character, and clearly state that they are an MG – motorcycle gang – rather than a club. Their motto is equally brash: ‘We’re the people our parents warned us about.’

For the Angels, the prospect of either club on British soil was bad enough (the Outlaws and Bandidos have a non-aggression pact and members of one often tattoo themselves with one other club’s colours as a mark of respect) but tensions with the Bandido Nation in particular were at an all-time high.

The latter had announced their intention to open a chapter in Denmark, using former members of the Bullshit Motorcycle Club, which had broken up after their leader was gunned down by a Hells Angel in 1985. The Copenhagen chapter of the Bandidos opened in early 1993 and within six months the Bandidos had expanded into Sweden, Norway and Finland, and had numbers rivalling those of the Scandinavian Angels. Not only that, the Bandidos were becoming increasingly active in the local drugs scene, taking valuable sales away from Angels-sponsored dealers. Tensions between the two groups increased until the inevitable happened.

The fighting began in 1994 when a Hells Angel was shot dead in the southern Swedish port of Helsingborg during a fight that also saw a Danish Bandido wounded. In March a Finnish leader of the Bandidos, Jarkko Kokko, was shot dead in Helsinki. Days later Bandidos leaders were attacked at airports in Oslo and Copenhagen. In July a Danish Bandido was shot near Drammen in Norway.

A week or so later an anti-tank missile – one of a batch of twelve stolen from a Swedish army base – was fired at the empty clubhouse of a Finnish Hells Angels affiliate. The building was reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. Days later two similar rockets slammed into Angels clubhouses in Copenhagen and Jutland.

In October 1995 several Hells Angels were dining at the Stardust restaurant in Copenhagen when they were set upon by a group of Bandidos. Two Angels had to make a humiliating escape via the women’s toilet. The incident prompted the Angels to obtain missiles and explosives of their own and go about seeking revenge.

Within a few weeks they had fired an anti-tank grenade at a prison in Copenhagen housing a Bandido accused of an earlier missile attack against the Angels. The Bandido was wounded but survived.

In October 1996, during the annual ‘Viking Party’ of the Hells Angels in their heavily fortified headquarters in Titangade, central Copenhagen, the Bandidos fired an anti-tank missile from the sloping roof of a nearby building. It tore through the concrete wall and exploded in a ball of molten metal. Louis Nielsen, a thirty-eight-year-old prospect for the Angels, was killed, as was twenty-nine-year-old Janne Krohn, a local woman who was only at the party because the Angels wanted to improve their image by opening the event to neighbours.

Shockwaves from the attack were felt throughout Europe and beyond, and as a result a bill was rushed through the Danish Parliament giving police sweeping new powers. The ‘Biker Law’ was used to prohibit gang members gathering in residential areas, and allowed police to close down many of the bikers’ clubhouses. At the same time they introduced round-the-clock surveillance of the remaining biker strongholds, and kept a close watch on the key players in the conflict.

Yet, despite the clampdown, more violence followed.

In January 1997 a Hells Angel was shot dead in his car in Aalborg, Denmark, and six months later a car bomb exploded outside the Bandidos clubhouse in Drammen, Norway. A woman was killed as she drove past. The blast flattened the heavily fortified building, set nearby factories ablaze, and shattered windows three-quarters of a mile away.

That attack was followed by another three days later, in which one Bandido was killed and three wounded by a Hells Angels associate who opened fire at them outside a restaurant crowded with holidaymakers in the Danish resort town of Liseleje.