Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs Read online

  In the UK, the Brothers of the Third Wheel (BTW) go to great pains to point out that they are an association for trike riders, rather than a club. They have many female members, revel in a family atmosphere and have never been involved in any form of conflict. Following careful negotiations, their members are allowed to wear a symbol on their backs because the one percenter clubs have designated it a badge, not a patch. Despite this the Hell’s Angels have forbidden BTW members from displaying their colours anywhere in the county of Kent.

  Such rules exist because an MC has to be seen to be the dominant club in the area it controls and the best way to do this is to ensure that no other club ever wears their colours without permission. When clubs fail to follow this rule, wars start and all too quickly escalate out of control.

  THE END

  2nd April 2006, Connecticut, USA

  By the time he saw the gun it was already too late.

  Hell’s Angel Paul Carrol was midway between New York and Boston, cruising south down the I-95 with two dozen members of the notorious biker gang, black leather emblazoned with the winged death’s head logo, chrome gleaming from their heavily customised bikes.

  Drivers on both sides of the freeway moved aside to let the bikers pass or slowed down to have a good long gape. As the group approached exit 42 near West Haven, a green SUV with Florida plates that had been coming up fast on the outside lane suddenly decelerated to match its speed with that of Club President Roger ‘Bear’ Mariani who was riding at the front of the pack. Carrol could only watch in horror as a semi-automatic pistol appeared in the nearside window and let off two shots. One struck him in the arm, it looked like the other missed its mark, and the car sped off into the distance.

  Tough guys are two a penny in the biker world but Bear undoubtedly stood out from the crowd. A Vietnam veteran, he had not only been awarded the Purple Heart (a decoration given to soldiers wounded in combat) on two separate occasions but had also won a Bronze Star for heroism. At the age of sixty-one, he’d lost none of his youthful vigour. Pulling over to the side of the freeway, he set his heavy Harley Davidson on its side stand and only then revealed that the second bullet had hit him square in the chest. He collapsed and bled to death on the spot in a matter of minutes.

  Carrol was so traumatised by what he had seen that when the emergency services arrived, he forgot all about the code of silence that prohibits members of the Angels from discussing anything to do with the club with ‘citizens’ – non club members. With tears welling in his eyes at the sight of his fallen friend, he told the paramedics that the four men in the SUV had all been wearing jackets that identified them as members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club – the Angels’ long-standing rivals.

  By 2006, the Hell’s Angels and the Outlaws had been in a bitter and increasingly violent feud with one another for over thirty years and both had suffered hundreds of casualties. Mariani’s death had been the direct result of a new edict issued by Jack Rosga, national president of the Outlaws, for members of his club to seek out and murder Hell’s Angels. It was a call that echoed around the world.

  On 12th August 2007, London Hell’s Angel Gerry Tobin was shot dead in broad daylight as he drove down the M40 at around ninety miles an hour. In circumstances that were almost identical to the attack on Mariani, two shots were fired from a green car. The first bullet smashed through the metal mudguard at the back of Tobin’s Harley Davidson and skirted through his rear wheel; the second skimmed the base of the biker’s helmet and lodged in his skull, killing him instantly.

  His assassins were quickly identified as members of the Outlaws and within weeks, seven members of the south Warwickshire chapter had been charged with his murder. The men responsible had no personal animosity for Mr Tobin and had never met him. As prosecutor Timothy Raggatt QC told the jury, ‘this was a man who was targeted not because of who he was, but because of what he was. In one sense, Gerry Tobin was a random victim.’

  So far as the general public were concerned, this was the first time the global conflict between the Outlaws MC and the Hell’s Angels had reached the UK. The reality was very different. And in truth, the seeds for Gerry Tobin’s death had been sewn some twenty-one years earlier …

  PART ONE

  GENESIS

  MAYHEM IN THE MIDLANDS

  14th May 1986

  Daniel ‘Snake Dog’ Boone had been a full member of the Warwickshire-based Pagans MC for a little less than a month when he got his first opportunity to kill for the club. Brandishing a sawn-off Webley 12-gauge shotgun and hell-bent on taking the ultimate revenge, he joined a five-man, early morning raiding party that smashed its way into the home of a leading figure from a rival clan. The group stormed up the cluttered staircase and made their way to the master bedroom where they found their prey sound asleep, alongside his girlfriend.

  The terrified woman was dragged off the mattress, thrown into a corner of the room, gagged and then covered with the quilt so she would not have to witness the events that were to follow. While three of the team immobilised their target against the bedstead, Boone forced the barrel of the gun deep into the man’s mouth and began to squeeze the trigger.

  The trouble had started a week or so earlier when it emerged that a man living on the edge of the area the Pagans considered to be their own had become a prospect – probationary member – of their despised rivals, the Leicestershire-based Ratae MC. Maintaining absolute control over territory is the first order of business for all motorcycle gangs, but also one of their greatest challenges. Each weekend and as often as possible during the week, the Pagans would gather together and try to get around as much of their turf as possible, partly to remind people that they were in charge but also to give potential recruits the opportunity to approach them.

  A favoured watering hole was a lively Irish bar called O’Malleys in Rugby, a few miles from the Leicestershire border. But with so much other ground to cover and no members living nearby, it simply wasn’t practical for the Pagans to drink there more than once in a blue moon.

  The Ratae, who had already expanded to the north and east by forging close links with bikers in other counties, were quick to sense an opportunity. Keen to gain new ground closer to home, Warwickshire seemed a good place to start and Rugby, with its biker-friendly bar and apparent lack of serious opposition, quickly rose to the top of their hit list.

  It was while the Ratae were drinking in O’Malleys that they happened across a local biker who expressed an interest in becoming part of the MC scene. After letting him hang around with them for a while and checking into his background, the gang offered him the chance to become a prospect, an invitation he eagerly accepted.

  Once Boone and the rest of the Pagans learned what had happened, their objection was a simple one: if the man wanted to join the Ratae, he would have to move to Leicestershire. As a resident of Warwickshire with an interest in MCs, he should have approached the Pagans in the first instance (though he had now blown his chances of ever being accepted by them). His counter-argument was equally simple: he never saw the Pagans in his area, but the Ratae were there regularly so he assumed the town belonged to them.

  In truth, the prospect was being used as a pawn. The Ratae knew full well that O’Malleys was outside their turf and wanted to see how far the Warwickshire gang were willing to go to defend it. The Pagans had made plenty of threats, but did they have the balls to follow any of them through? So far as the Pagans were concerned, their credibility was on the line, as was their place as the dominant MC in Warwickshire. The Ratae had left them no choice: they had to do something.

  An MC is a band of brothers like no other and becoming a fully patched member of one is a lengthy and deeply involved process that is the same all over the world. It is made deliberately difficult, partly to weed out the unsuitable and ensure full commitment to the lifestyle but also to prevent undercover law enforcement officials from gaining access to a club in all but the most extreme circumstances.

  The road to a full
patch begins as an official hangaround. To attain this status a biker might typically have met several members of a club through drinking at their regular bar, attending rallies or even being a guest of another hangaround at the clubhouse.

  Compared to what follows, the hangaround stage is something of a honeymoon period. The club has no real claim on the potential recruit and cannot call on him to take part in anything more than the most rudimentary activities. Likewise, while the biker is able to attend certain club events and literally hang around in the clubhouse in order to get to know all the members of a chapter (and vice versa), they have no official association with the club.

  It is at this stage that clubs are particularly on the lookout for those attempting to join with a specific agenda in mind. There have been countless cases of bikers who have been bullied or harassed in some way and decided to get their own back by trying to join an MC. They figure that once they are in they can take advantage of the ‘one in, all in’ rule to drag an entire chapter into what is essentially a personal conflict. Such antics are frowned upon: the rule is that if something develops while you are in the club, you will receive full backup. But anything that happens before you join is baggage that you must leave behind.

  Some hangarounds have no intention of taking things further, others are eager to become more deeply involved. In both cases the only rule they have to abide by is that you can only be a hangaround with one club at a time. It is the first hint at the level of loyalty and commitment that is required to make it into an MC.

  The hangaround stage typically lasts anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Sometimes it becomes obvious to those in the club that someone isn’t made of the right stuff to progress. At other times, the bikers themselves, having gotten a better view of what is actually involved, change their minds and withdraw.

  To reach the next stage of membership, prospect, requires the sponsorship of a full patch holder who remains responsible for the newcomer until they receive a full patch of their own. Bringing high quality recruits to the attention of the club can enhance the status of a member but if anything goes wrong – for example, the member turns out to be an undercover police officer – then the sponsor is likely to be severely punished. For this reason, prospects are usually subjected to stringent background checks to ensure they are exactly who they say they are.

  Occasionally there are prospects that rub some existing members up the wrong way, but this rarely happens. The truly obnoxious recruits tend to fall at the first hurdle of the hangaround stage. Those that make the cut to prospect end up adapting in order to fit in with the club, often ending up as quite different people by the time they gain their full patch. This blending in with the brotherhood is one of the things that makes the bond between members of an MC so strong.

  Some clubs distinguish prospects by only letting them wear the bottom rocker of their colours along with an MC patch, others have special ‘probationary member’ jackets for prospects to wear. Prospects have no identity other than their lowly rank. A patch holder rarely refers to a prospect by name. Instead it is ‘Get me a beer, prospect,’ or, ‘Prospect, drive my old lady home.’

  As a prospect you are basically a slave and to all intents and purposes you become the property of the club. Whenever a full patch member asks you to do something, it counts as an order that you have to obey without question. There is not much a full patch member can’t ask a prospect to do, so prospects find themselves getting involved in everything from stealing bikes and moving drugs to cleaning toilets at the clubhouse and polishing endless amounts of chrome. Some members have their prospects doing press-ups in the gutter simply to dominate them, others force them to take part in crazy stunts, like walking across hot coals during club parties.

  For every ten prospects that sign up, on average around three will make the cut. Like most MCs, the Pagans always believed the credo that the patch does not make the man, rather the man has to make the patch. ‘You take a good man and bring him into the club in order to make the club better, Snake Dog,’ the club president had told Boone. ‘It doesn’t work the other way around. You can’t become a prospect and then become a member and then become a better man. That’s not what we’re looking for at all.’

  Even in the case of a born natural, there is practically no way to avoid the prospect stage. Those who have been full patch members of other clubs and left in ‘good standings’ are still required to prospect for whatever new club they want to join, though in such cases they may end up getting their patches relatively quickly. One Pagan, Rabbi, had received his own patch in less than six months having been a full member of an MC called ‘The Filthy Few’ a short time before. Boone had to wait a year and a half for his.

  For a prospect to be made up to full member, the whole chapter has to be one hundred per cent in favour. Depending on the reasons put forward, a single dissenting vote may either mean the prospect is out of the club completely or simply has to continue his life of servitude for a few more weeks or months until another vote comes round.

  In any MC, the moment a prospect receives his full set of patches is a high point of his biking life and something he will never forget. For Boone it was as if all his birthdays had come at once. He spent the rest of the evening and most of the next day just riding around Warwickshire, flying his patches left, right and centre, wanting to be seen by as many people as possible. The feeling of pride and satisfaction was so intense it almost made him giddy. All the sacrifices and hard work he had put in over the preceding eighteen months had finally paid off and he had won the ultimate prize. He knew there and then that his life would never be the same.

  As a full member, the club becomes your second skin. Each member is permanently on call. If other members are in trouble or need assistance, you are there for them. And between the weekly meetings known as ‘church’ and group events known as ‘runs’, you invariably have something going on that includes club members. Rarely a day goes by when you do not see one of your club mates for some reason or other.

  The club is your extended family. The men become your brothers and their wives and girlfriends become your sisters. Their children will be friends with your own children. Some of the younger, single members share houses together. In every MC, if you cut one member, they all bleed.

  Hence when, in the late spring of 1986, the Pagans heard that a Ratae prospect was regularly drinking at O’Malleys while brazenly wearing his patches, it was bound to lead to trouble. The more the prospect flew his colours within the Pagans’ territory, the weaker their claim on the area. A series of increasingly threatening warnings failed to have any effect so a decision was made to visit the new recruit in person and take his patches by force.

  As it turned out, little actual force was needed. When the group of Pagans arrived at the prospect’s door the following day, he offered no resistance. He knew exactly why they were there and exactly what they wanted. He handed over his patches without a single punch being thrown.

  The Pagans returned to their clubhouse and waited for the Ratae to make their next move. Tradition dictated that their sergeant-at-arms would contact his opposite number in the Pagans and arrange a meeting. As separate MCs in separate areas, the proceedings would take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Ground rules would be laid out: typically the Ratae would agree not to have any members in Warwickshire and the Pagans would agree not to expand into Ratae territory.

  But the men from Leicester had other ideas. Two nights after the prospect’s patches were taken, a team of Ratae burst into the home of a Pagan who lived in Nuneaton. After pounding both the man and his wife into submission with fists, heavy boots and baseball bats, the husband was dragged over to a corner of the room and forced to watch while his wife was repeatedly and horribly brutalised right in front of him. He was then struck on the head several times with a ball peen hammer so hard that part of his skull fractured and caved in. His attackers then fled into the night, leaving him for dead.

  The vicious a
ttack made it obvious to the Pagans that the situation wasn’t going to resolve itself without more blood being spilled. There had been enough incidents of interclub conflict in the preceding years for the members to know that there was every possibility that some of them might lose their lives, or find themselves being forced to take the lives of others.

  Club President Caz called an emergency meeting to discuss their options and one of the members, a tall, heavy-set man who had been around for longer than anyone could recall, stood up and said that he was going to have to leave. ‘Listen lads, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to be there for you. I haven’t got the stomach for this. It’s just not for me.’

  He took off his patches and carefully placed them on the centre of the table in front of him and then walked out of the room. No one ever saw him again.

  The attack at Nuneaton had taken place in the early hours of the morning and most of the Pagans did not learn about it until much later in the day. They rushed to the George Eliot Hospital and learned that their colleague was in a critical condition, possibly suffering brain damage, and slipping in and out of a coma. His wife was also in the hospital being treated for various injuries of her own. In the waiting room, the corridors and the car park, all the talk centred on one topic: revenge.

  A car had been spotted leaving the scene of the attack and, thanks to an associate working at the DVLA, the Pagans were able to match the registration number to an address. Early the following morning five full patch members – Boone, Rabbi, Link, Dozer and Tank – met up at the clubhouse, armed themselves with a variety of weapons and headed out into enemy territory.