Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (36 page)

Ye
ah
it is
.

Would you prefer to be called Mr
Graham
or Charlie today?

Charlie’s fine
by me
.

So is
it actually Charlie? It’s no
t short for Charles
or anything else
?

No,
it’s
just Charlie.

That’s an unusual name though isn’t it?

Could be, I’ve never thought about it.

So who named you Charlie?

Damage
.

Damage?

My dad, Damage.

As we’ve heard, t
hat’s a
nother club nick
name
is it not
?

Yeah.

That would be Mr Martin Robertson?

Yeah, that’s him.

The person with whom Mr Parke wrote his book
Heavy Duty People
about Mr
Robertson
’s life within the club?

Ye
ah
.

And
do you know
why Mr Robertson, Damage, ha
d
you called Charlie
?

I guess so.

And why was that?

I think it was his idea of a joke.

A joke
Charlie
, what kind of a joke? Why would naming you Charlie have been such a joke to Mr Robertson?

Because of what he did.

And what
did he do
Charlie
?

He was a dealer.

What kind of a dealer
Charlie
?

The big kind.

Again,
I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to
please
explain that a bit more for the benefit of the jury.

Damage, my dad, Mr Robertson,
he
was a big time coke dealer. He ran a major cocaine smuggling operation.

And so naming you Charlie
…?

Was his idea of a joke
.
Charlie, coke, you see
?

Yes, I see. And what did you think of this joke of his
?

Well he was my dad, he gave me my name, what are you going to do about it?

Quite
. B
ut how did you feel about it, about being named after the drugs that your father was importing? Did you like it? Did you see the joke? Did you find it funny?

No, of course I didn’t
.

And why not?

Well I saw what the drugs trade did to him
.

Oh really, and what was that?

First i
t got him jailed for life, and then it got him killed.

You have heard, haven’t you, the
Prosecution
’s evidence given in this case including the
extracts
from a diary or journal allegedly kept by Mr Iain Parke?

Ye
ah
.

Did you know Mr Parke?

I’d met him
,
yeah.

In what circumstances?

He’d been tagging along with the club when I was striking. He’d had one of Wibble’s support patches on so he was
tight with him when he was P
.

So when you first became officially involved with the club,
when you
began to serve your apprenticeship towards full membership
as it were
,
you could see that Mr Parke
was already well known to, and involved with, the club
. More than that even, he was
in fact a close personal associate of Mr
Stephen
Nelson
, known as Wibble
,
while he was effectively the club’s national president
,
was he not
?

Well he’d been around for a while before that I guess. He’s written that book of his about my dad, but yeah he was around, and then you didn’t get a personal support patch off of the Freemen P without being close with him.

And when there are references to Charlie in Mr Parke’s
journal that has been presented in evidence here in Court,
these are references to you. Is that correct?

I guess so.

You guess?

Well you’d have to ask him wouldn’t you? He wrote
i
t
and that book
,
not me
,
so he’s the one who can tell you who he’s talking about.

So what did you think of his book?

Not a lot
.

Can you tell the
C
ourt why not?

It was
bullshit,
and in fact that was one of the things that was so strange about him being around.

Strange, in what way was that strange?

The club isn’t about being a
poser
. You don’t talk about the club or club business to outsiders
, you don’t tell anyone who isn’t a club member jack
shit about the club or what it does, it’s just one of our rules.

Why not?

It’s just the way it is
. T
he club is our business, not anyone else’s.

And yet
here we have
Mr Parke
, who
had written extensively about the club
hadn’t he?
Not just an article or two as you might expect from any journalist in his line of work. But a complete book delving into details, and naming names.
In doing so, he, an outsider, had gone completely against this code and publicly described what he claimed to be details of the club’s affairs. Now either he had been telling the truth when he did so…

Which he wasn’t
.

Well quite so, o
r he’d been making it up. Either way,
as a result,
you might not expect him to be too popular with the club
’
s members would you? Either he was disclosing details, and potentially very damaging ones at that, which the club would not want revealed
;
or he was writing sensationalist copy making false and very serious charges against
the past, and one of the present,
senior members
and officers
of the club
wasn’t he?
Whichever way you looked at it, the fact that he was then continuing to be involved with the club, going on runs, attending events
,
and even consorting closely with the club
p
resident
,
does look very odd doesn’t it?

Yeah.

How about Mr
Milton
, Bung, what was his
rel
ationship with Mr Parke?

Bung was Wibble’s wingman.

His w
ingman?

Wibble’s number two, his sidekick, his business partner.

I see. And so
what was he in relation to Mr P
arke
?

Bung was h
is bodyguard
.

He was Mr
P
arke’s bodyguard?

Yeah. Wibble had set it up so Bung would look after him, and Park
i
e never went anywhere at club dos without Bung
being
around.

That’s somewhat unusual isn’t it?
A
so called
‘
civilian
’
, al
l
b
e
it a club supporter, having a full patch member of the club acting as their personal bodyguard at all club events?

Well
,
I guess Wibble didn’t want him to get hurt.

Indeed.
So why was that then
Charlie
? What was the relationship between Mr Parke and Wibble? Why, if Mr Parke had publicly spilled the beans on crime in the club, or at the very best had slandered the club’s name with a range of
serious
allegations, did Wibble allow him to remain so closely involved with the club? Why was he so solicitous about his safety that he arranged for his own business partner to act as Mr Parke’s bodyguard?
What was going on here
Charlie
?

Well that’s what everybody wondered.

Can I just touch on something that Mr Parke mentioned in his book which has also come
up
in the papers shown to the Court. I
n his writings about your club, Mr Parke made reference to a Bonesman patch, a badge worn by certain members of the club. Are you familiar with this badge?

Yes.

Are you the wearer of such a badge yourself?

Yes.

Can you describe this badge to the jury.

It’s a sort of skull and crossbones.

And what is the significance of this badge?

Well
,
people talk a load of crap about it and what it means.

So what do they say about it?

That it’s awarded to people for killing on behalf of the club, but that’s bullshit.

And
who are the people who
you claim
say this
sort of thing about it
?

The cops mainly, and lazy journalists who rely on them for their stories
. B
ut it really is just crap. Just another story that’s been made up about us, another piece of mud that’s been slung at us.

But w
hy do
you think
they say it
if it’s not correct
?

Well once it’s been said enough, then people just believe it don’t they?

And do people believe it?

Ye
ah
,
I think so.

I’m interested to ask, why do people believe it of you and the club? Why would the police say it if it wasn’t true?

Because our problem is we’re too useful, we make too good a set of villains for them.

Why do you say that?

We’re obvious, we put big patches on our back
s
and we ride around on big bikes and we don’t give a shit about normal society and what it wants. We’re the guys who’ve decided we’re going to be free of all that shit, we’re just going to rely on each other, on our brothers, and screw everyone else. And that makes us a threat, a target. People don’t like freedom, not the kind of freedom that we represent anyway. It’s too much for them, too scary. So they hate us. And the cops love that. The bigger the threat, the greater the terror we are, the bigger they can seem by keeping us down or out or whatever the fuck they want to do with us.

So they demonise you?

Fuck yeah. We just want to be left alone to get on with what we want to do. To ride and party but the cops
just
can’t let that go. They harass us, they spread these crappy stories about us being big time gangsters and stuff. They want you all to see us as the big bad menace,
cos
without us, and the likes of us, what have the cops got to do to justify their time and costs while they tick off the
days
waiting to collect their pensions?

So you’re not big time gangsters
,
as you put it?

Shit
no. I live in a
two
bed semi on an ordinary estate. It’s hardly the sort of pad an international master criminal would have is it? Besides which, you’ve seen what we look like from the cops
’
photos of runs and things that they’ve shown here. I mean, like I said, we ride around on big loud bikes wearing big patches on our backs that say who we are and where we’re from. It’s hardly what you’d do if you were a bunch of organized criminals is it?

So are you disorganized criminals then?

We’re a bike club, and that’s it.

With no criminals?

Fuck no, I can’t say that. Sure we’ll have had criminals who are members in the past, we’ll have them again in the future
,
and probably for all I know have them now. But so what? Name me an
organization
that’s never had criminals amongst its membership? The cops? The masons? Parliament? Have they had criminals in them? Are they criminal organizations?