Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs (29 page)

Obsessed with the military (he lied and told friends he had served with the elite special forces) Jock insisted that club members took part in weekly combat training sessions and spent time marching in formation around a makeshift parade ground outside their clubhouse in a Sydney suburb. The Comancheros soon became his own private army.

Vicious fights with other biker clubs were commonplace and regularly made headlines in the local press, cuttings of which Jock lovingly kept in a special folder. In one notorious incident, the club butted heads with the Loners, a small city-based MC. After one of the Loners threatened several Comancheros with a shotgun Jock launched a counter attack in which several Loners were beaten, and then suggested the two sides meet at a hotel to establish a truce.

The Loners were keen to comply and turned up at the appointed place unarmed, as promised. They were met by two carloads of Comancheros wielding baseball bats and, after receiving a sound beating, were forced to hand over their colours, putting the club out of existence. Police arrived on the scene but none of the Loners would press charges. Although their club had been destroyed, they remained loyal to the MC code of silence knowing that any breach would only add to their humiliation.

In the late seventies Anthony ‘Snoddy’ Spencer joined the club. A former Navy rating, he was an orphan who had witnessed his own mother’s suicide and spent his formative years in-and-out of care institutions. He was nineteen when he discovered the Comancheros and finally found the family and sense of acceptance he had been searching for. Jock, twelve years older at the time, became like a father to him.

Snoddy’s arrival coincided with growing dissent in the ranks: ‘If I’d wanted to march around all fucking day I’d of joined the army,’ was an increasingly common complaint. But things got far worse when Jock himself was found to have broken one of the club’s cardinal rules.

Comanchero sergeant-at arms Colin ‘Caesar’ Campbell and a friend were visiting a club member when they saw
Jock’s vehicle parked at the front of the house. They looked in through an open window and saw Jock having sex with the member’s wife. The two men knocked on the door and when Jock answered, they stared at him and walked off without a word. The Supreme Commander had breached one of his own commandments. For Snoddy, it was the ultimate act of betrayal. The man he had looked up to and seen as his mentor had turned his back on everything Snoddy had been taught to believe in.

Campbell tried to force his president to attend a church meeting to answer the charges against him but instead, in early 1982, Jock split the Comanchero into two separate chapters, one based in the western suburbs of Sydney and led by Jock himself, the other in the city-centre, led by an increasingly disillusioned Snoddy.

A couple of years earlier, Snoddy and another Comanchero had travelled to America to buy Harley Davidson parts. While there they had met and partied with members of the Bandidos who by then had established chapters in more than a dozen states. For Snoddy it was a revelation: here was a club that didn’t bother with drills or parades, they were into bikes, partying and making money through crime. They were, thought Snoddy, everything the Comancheros were not, but everything he wanted them to be.

Three months after the split, Snoddy and several other Comancheros resigned from the club, burning their colours in a ceremonial bonfire. The defectors included Caesar Campbell and his five brothers – Bull, Chop, Wack, Shadow and Snake-Eyes – a veritable biker clan in their own right. Having obtained permission direct from president Ronnie
Hodge, Snoddy then proceeded to set up the first Australian chapter of the Bandidos.

For Jock, this alliance with a foreign club was the ultimate act of betrayal by the man he saw as his ‘adopted son’. He branded the lot of them traitors and deserters, and would only refer to them as ‘Bandaids’. As the weeks went by, the rivalry between the two groups became increasingly intense and spawned a number of clashes, including roadside beatings, bar brawls and several exchanges of gunfire. Both sides tried to negotiate peace but after one particularly heated telephone call, Jock declared all-out war on the newcomers.

At a July 1984 meeting at the Bandidos clubhouse, a furious Snoddy made it clear the dispute would not end without blood being spilled. ‘Something has got to be done about Jock and the Comancheros and anybody in the Club who has got any guts and wants to get rid of the problem, not just by bashing them, meet me in the bar after the meeting. We want to get rid of Jock permanently.’

Rules of conflict were quickly drawn up, including a prohibition of members being ‘hit’ at their homes or places of work. Any other location was considered fair game.

Both clubhouses were turned into fortresses with windows boarded up, gun parapets erected and barbed wire stretched across all the entrances.

The Bandidos also called in backup. Ronnie Hodge and three other club members made their way to the Australian Embassy in Los Angeles to obtain visas to travel to Sydney. Their applications were refused.

On the morning of Father’s Day, 2nd September 1984, the Bandidos threw down the gauntlet by turning up at the
home of a Comanchero member (a breach of the rules of conflict) and letting him know that they would be attending the British Motorcycle Club swap meet that afternoon. A family event attended by dozens of bikers and patch clubs from across the country, the meet would take place at the Viking Tavern, a popular watering hole in the western Sydney suburb of Milperra.

The news got back to Jock who immediately began to organise an attack, arranging to get to the site long before the Bandidos arrived and setting out his forces in a ‘Bull’s Horns’ formation similar to that used by the Zulus against British forces, a conflict he had studied in depth as part of his obsession with all things military. Each Comanchero team was issued with a walkie-talkie so they could coordinate their movements.

The original plan was for Jock to lull the Bandidos into a false sense of security by letting them think he was at the meet alone. Once they approached him, the rest of the Comancheros would launch an attack from their strategic positions. The only glitch in the plan was that, when the Bandidos failed to show up, their rivals relaxed and began drinking, discarding their walkie-talkies at the bar.

The Bandidos – including Snoddy and five of the six Campbell brothers – seemed to arrive out of nowhere. For a few moments there was an awkward standoff between the two gangs as they lined up on either side of the crowded car park. Both sides were equipped with shotguns and rifles as well as baseball bats, knives, chains and iron bars (although the Bandidos – having scouted the area earlier and seen no sign of the Comancheros – had left much of their arsenal in the van).

Neutral bikers, many of who had attended the event with their families and minutes earlier had been enjoying a jovial, carnival atmosphere, could scarcely believe their eyes at the sight of the weaponry being brandished. But Jock was ready. He raised a machete with the words ‘Bandaid hair parter’ crudely painted on it above his head and waved it in a small circle, the signal his club had been waiting for. ‘Kill ’em all!’ he screamed, and the slaughter began. Two sets of bikers who only a few months earlier had all belonged to the same club and considered one another brothers went after each other’s blood.

Jock had issued strict orders to his men about who to target first and Snoddy and the members of the Campbell clan were top of the hit list. In the midst of the car park Geoff ‘Snake Eyes’ Campbell suddenly found himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun. He had just got off his bike and was armed only with a chain that served as a belt in his jeans and a 4-inch folding knife. He raised his clenched fists: ‘Fight with these?’ The Comanchero shook his head then pulled the trigger. The blast hit Campbell straight in the gut, shredding his flesh. For a brief moment he felt nothing and stood stationary, wondering whether to make a dash for the gun, and then the pain hit and dropped him to the ground, blood pouring from his wound.

A second Comanchero, one who had been a close friend of the Campbell brothers, appeared and loomed over Snake-Eyes, a shotgun pointed inches from his face.

‘Do it then,’ gasped Snake-Eyes.

The Comanchero winked and moved the gun away. ‘Not today Snake,’ he said. ‘Not today.’

Caesar Campbell saw his brother fall and ran to his aid.
He managed only a few steps before he was hit with two shotgun blasts in the back and a third that tore through his shoulder. He span round and collapsed on his back where he received a fourth shot to the chest.

Mario ‘Chop’ Ciantar who had been adopted into the Campbell family at the age of twelve pulled out his .357 revolver and began firing wildly as he ran towards his fallen brothers. At least one of his bullets found a Comanchero target, striking the man dead, but another flew wide and crashed into the face of fourteen-year-old innocent bystander Leanne Walters, killing her instantly.

Chop never made it. As he ducked past the crowds of screaming women and children, desperate to get out of the line of fire, he was struck by a hail of bullets and hit the ground hard. Elsewhere in the car park, the youngest brother, John ‘Wack’ Campbell was shot the instant he climbed onto a bike belonging to Philip ‘Bull’ Campbell. The blast catapulted him into the back of a nearby car and left his right arm literally hanging by a fleshy thread.

By now the Bandidos had regrouped and were starting to fight back, forcing the Comanchero to retreat to the back of the bar. The individual Bandidos had also been assigned specific targets with others appointed ‘rovers’ to back up anyone who was in danger of being overwhelmed. Three more Comancheros were killed in quick succession. One, Ivan ‘Sparrow’ Romcek was hit at such close range that wadding from the spent shotgun cartridge was embedded in his neck. Another, Tony ‘Dog’ McCoy was hit in the face and chest and died before he even hit the ground.

Refusing to seek cover so that he could observe and direct the battle, the Comanchero Supreme Commander Jock was
shot in the chest and in the left side of his head, the latter bullet shattering his teeth and penetrating his brain.

Friends carried Snake-Eyes to safety, but as soon as they put him down he found himself staring at the agonised face of Gregory ‘Shadow’ Campbell who had been blasted through the throat moments earlier, after challenging another shotgun-wielding Comanchero to put down his gun and ‘fight like a man’ with his fists. ‘I can’t breathe,’ gasped Shadow, and Snake-Eyes knew there and then that his brother was going to die. As he looked on helplessly, Shadow drowned in his own blood.

Over 200 police officers were called to the scene and one, Detective Superintendent John Garvey almost got caught up in the tail end of the violence when he came face to face with Comanchero Ray ‘Sunshine’ Kucler who, despite having suffered a major head wound, pointed his loaded shotgun directly at him. It took several minutes of tense, careful negotiation and reassurances that the police only wanted to disarm the bikers, so that the paramedics could enter and care for the injured, before Kucler agreed to put his weapon down. By then, six bikers were dead and twenty-eight were seriously injured. Incredibly, despite the mayhem, the bar had continued to trade throughout.

The deaths continued even after the shooting stopped. In prison, racked with guilt and feeling personally responsible for the deaths of the two Campbell brothers, Snoddy recorded his feelings, frustrations and depressions in a series of diary entries. ‘My mind is starting to crack,’ he wrote. ‘I just don’t understand what is happening to us. I don’t know how much longer I can hang on to my sanity. I wish we could get bail soon. It is sending me round the twist.’

On Saturday 28th April 1985 at six am, Snoddy was found hanging from the shower rail in cell 3233, Wing 3 of Parklea Prison. After his body had been taken down, the other Bandido inmates were allowed to gather round his body and pay their last respects to their deceased president.

Bull, who had spent almost an hour lying on the pavement hugging the body of his dying brother Shadow at the shootout, also died before the court case began – a result, his family insist, of injuries he received on the day.

Thirty-nine bikers were subsequently put on trial. Not one of the accused from either side was willing to testify. Jock – who survived his wounds much to the utter amazement of his medical team – was singled out by the judge as being primarily responsible for the violence, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Seven other Comancheros also received life sentences. Sixteen of the new Bandidos received fourteen years for manslaughter. The trial itself was the largest, longest and most expensive in Australian legal history.

The shootout, which ultimately came to be known as the Milperra Massacre, put an end to the undisputed reign of the Comancheros and to their dominance in the Sydney drug trade, and accelerated the rise of the Bandidos in Australia, not to mention further enhancing the club’s reputation for violence elsewhere in the world. The incident also acted as a wake-up call in Australia and beyond about just how ruthless and deadly the supposedly loveable rogues in the biker gangs could be.

During the course of their Australia trip, Boone also visited the chapter in Tasmania where they partied with many of the Outlaws they had met in Daytona. They also hung out
with Sid Collins, president and founder of the Melbourne Outlaws and famous as the man who was shot in the stomach by a 9mm pistol wielded by legendary underworld toe-cutter and hitman-turned-author Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. (Chopper’s lawyer suggested the biker had framed her client because the real gunman was a fellow motorcycle gang member, but this didn’t wash in court.)