Wrecking Crew : the brutal true story of the Bandidos' legendary sergeant-at-arms

201 Pages·2011·1.62 MB·English

by  Caesar Campbell

Also by Caesar Campbell
Enforcer

In memory of Bandido Buffalo, who passed away in December 2010. He was a good brother and I got to know him well when he was
out here from Washington, in the United States.
In memory of Michael (Sheepskin) Langbien who died in March 2011 after a long illness. He was one of the hardest outlaw bikers I've
known, and next to me and my brothers, one of the best bluers. Here's to you, Sheepy.
I'm sure they've joined up with the rest of the Bandido brothers who are in the Ride Forever chapter, and that Shadow, Wack, Chop
and Snoddy will take extra good care of them where the petrol tanks are always full, there's a sunny breeze and a cool drink, and the
highways are made to do an easy dollar eighty.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRECKING CREW PICTURE SECTION
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
SYDNEY, 1991
I
pulled up in the main shopping drag of Woodcroft in Sydney's west and got a
park right outside the chemist. The missus went in to pick up some pills, while I
got out to stretch my legs. The street was humming with people coming and
going on their midday missions.
I'd been out of prison twelve months, but after four years of being locked
away these everyday trips up the shops still felt good. Just having the freedom to
go where you wanted, when you wanted. No one following you around. After
the chemist we were planning to go to Woolies to do the shopping, then grab
some lunch before heading home.
I was leaning against the warm bonnet of my hotted-up 1978 Fairlane – dark
chocolate with a white vinyl top – when I felt it, whack, in the left eye, and
suddenly all this blood started pissing out of my face. I couldn't see. I could just
feel it everywhere.
I was hanging over the guard trying to get the blood out of my other eye so
that I could figure out what was going on. I heard sheilas screaming, then my old
lady, Donna, came running out with all the girls from the chemist. ‘Are you all
right, Caesar? What happened?’
I was still focused on scooping the blood out of my right eye.
I heard one of them saying, ‘He's been shot.’ Then someone pressed
something into my forehead.
Some fella came running up from the bottom of the car park. ‘I saw a man
aiming a rifle from behind an open car door,’ he said. ‘He shot the gentleman.’
Even with a head full of lead I found that funny, him calling me a gentleman.
As I vagued out in the back of the ambulance carting me to hospital, it felt all
too familiar.
*
LATER I heard that the coppers had rocked up and interviewed everyone at the
chemist. I didn't expect them to find anything, and in any case I wasn't interested
in what the cops had to say. I had my own thoughts on who it could've been.
Top of my list was the Comancheros.
It was the Comancheros who'd ambushed us at Milperra six years earlier,
killing two of my brothers and sending the rest of us to jail. Since then I'd had all
those long, lonely nights locked up to plot my revenge. If I were the
Comancheros – and knowing what I'm capable of – I'd be trying to knock me
off, too.
But then, the Comos weren't the only blokes who'd be happy to see me six
feet under. I'd had blues with other clubs since I'd been out. There were blokes
who didn't like me up at the Cross, and there were certain people who thought
they could make a name for themselves by taking on the big, bad Caesar
Campbell.
You see, most straights assume that, after nearly dying at Milperra, losing
my brothers and going to prison, my life might settle down a bit. Maybe I'd
retreat to the suburbs with the kids and the dogs and put my finger collecting
behind me forever. Well, there's been more drama since I got out of jail than
there was before I went in. I was shot six times at Milperra, but I've copped more
lead than that in the years since. I've had bullets come through the house, I've
been shot in my front yard and out on the bike, and I've been popped in a blue.
I've been shot at close range and from snipers. Donna's trusty probe and tweezers
have pulled out everything from the biggest shotgun pellets down to .22 slugs.
And even with what she's taken out, I've still got that much shrapnel in my body
they've had to test me for lead poisoning.
I'm no straight. I've got no plans to slow down. I'm sixty-five now and earlier
this year while I was standing in the front yard with my dogs, three blokes
wearing bandanas over their faces pulled up and opened fire.
The worst part of it all, though, is that a lot of these bullets have come from
people they shouldn't have. See, I was part of the best bike club in the world: the
Bandidos. But the biker world started to change after Milperra. Us old-school
bikers were pushed aside to make room for the new breed, with their dollars and
their drive-bys. It took me a long while to realise just what was going on.
It's only now, looking back, that I can see how it unravelled – and how it all
began while we were in jail for the shootout at the Viking Tavern.
CHAPTER ONFEEBRUARY, 1986
T
he van came to a stop and I heard the steel gates close. From inside the back
of the van I could make out blokes talking. ‘Who've you got in there? There's
enough of you here to make up a small army.’
‘We've got the top Bandido.’
‘Who, Caesar?’
‘Yeah.’
I'd arrived at jail.
The truck turned around and backed up, beeping, into a dock. As the doors
clanged opened, I stood up, all in black with the sunglasses and the bandana, and
found myself staring down two rows of helmets and bulletproof vests. Black
batons raised. I thought: hmm, I'd like to have a go at a few of you.
A senior prison officer, all in blue with silver buttons on his shoulders, asked
my name and led me into reception. Inside was another ‘pipper’ – the blokes
with the silver pips on their shoulders – and a third screw with stripes. The
striper looked me up and down and handed me some prison greens – green T-
shirt, green pants, white underpants – while one of the pippers ordered me to
undress. ‘There's a nurse on her way over to check you out,’ he said.
I took off my gear and was handing it to the screw behind the counter when
this little blonde walked in. Her uniform was short and you could just about see
through it; she didn't have a bad body. She looked in my mouth, got me to lift
my balls then told me to turn round and spread my cheeks. Said she was satisfied
I wasn't carrying anything and that I was right to get dressed. Into my new green
uniform.
I had a leather guard on my right little finger, where the knuckle had been
shot out at Milperra.
‘You'll need to take that off,’ the pipper said.
‘I'm not taking it off.’
We started to argue but the nurse stepped in. ‘He needs the guard for his
finger.’
‘Well, all right then, but you'll have to get rid of the earring.’
I had a gold sleeper in my left ear which my brother Shadow had given me.
He'd been killed at Milperra. I looked at the screw. ‘Well, you can try and take it
out but it's superglued in.’
He gave it a tug but it wouldn't budge. ‘Fine. Follow me.’
As he led me towards a compound, the one thing I kept thinking was that I
wouldn't be waking up next to my old lady, Donna, any time soon. Wouldn't
have her by my side. It spun me out. I'd never been inside before. People find
that surprising about me and my brothers. This was the first time Bull, Snake and
Wack had ever even been charged with anything. Chop and Shadow had only
had one previous charge, and I'd had just one run-in with the courts but no
conviction. As the eldest brother and club sergeant, it'd been my job to keep us
out of trouble – and until Milperra I had. Now, ten minutes in the car park of the
Viking Tavern had seen the lot of us either killed or jailed.
There were gates going in all directions and various buildings laid out in a
circle. Flanked by three screws, I passed through a control area before another
big metal gate opened into the main compound. This was where the prisoners
were kept. Parklea was a new maximum security prison in north-western Sydney
that had only opened a couple of years earlier. It wasn't supposed to be a remand
prison for prisoners awaiting trial, but with the Comancheros in Long Bay, it
was too big a risk to put us all in together. So the Bandidos had been sent to
Parklea while we waited for our day in court. I was the last Bandido to arrive.
We went through the gates and suddenly there in front of me was one of the
best sights I'd seen in eighteen months. Bandidos everywhere: Kid Rotten,
Junior, Sparksy, and in among them my brothers Bull and Snake. Only my
brother Wack was missing; he'd recently been diagnosed with a heart condition
and been bailed to receive treatment. There were twenty-five of them all up, and
they were all running down towards me.
‘Just wait a few minutes till I've shown him to his cell and then you'll be able
to talk to him,’ the pipper told them. But they couldn't wait. They all jumped in
and hugged me.
Until you've shown you're prepared to die for your mates, you can't imagine
how strong a bond blokes can have. And we had.
*
THE LAST time the twenty-six of us had been together as a group had been at
Milperra on Father's Day in 1984. We'd rumbled into the car park of the Viking
Tavern on a Bandido club run to attend a bike parts swap meet, only to be
ambushed by a gang of Comancheros waving guns.
We'd split from the Comancheros a year earlier, sick of Como president Jock
Ross's ambition to run the club like a paramilitary organisation. The final straw
had been him screwing another member's old lady. It was completely against our
principles – not to mention the club laws. We were old-school bikers; we just
wanted to ride bikes and have fun. So we'd left, and with the approval of the
American Bandidos had established the first Australian Bandido outlaw
motorcycle club. I was the first Bandido to wear the new patch – in fact for ten
days I'd been the only Bandido in the country. When the rest of the patches had
arrived, we'd toasted with an oath I'd made up: ‘Cut one Bandido and we all
bleed.’ We were there for the brotherhood and the bikes, and our rules boiled
down to two things: you respected your brother and you respected your colours.
So you didn't rip off your brother selling him a crap bike and you didn't try to
crack onto your brother's old lady. And you always backed up your brother. We
were on track and there should've been only good times ahead – but Jock hadn't
been able to let us go. He'd declared guerrilla warfare on us, and for weeks we'd
copped pot shots and were run off the road by his lackeys.
I would have been more than happy to take on any of them in a punch-up,
but Jock was a gutless cunt who hid behind guns and walkie-talkies. His
warmongering ultimately erupted in the car park of the Viking Tavern.
Despite my challenging the Comos to put down their firearms and fight like
men that day, they'd started shooting and I'd copped bullets and pellets to my
stomach, lung, shoulder, forehead and back. I'd woken up a month later in
hospital to discover my brothers Shadow and Chop had been killed, and two
other brothers Wack and Snake had been badly hurt.
Four Comos and a young girl had also died, and when word went around the
hospital ward that the coppers were going to start charging us with murder –
well, there was no way I was going to lie there and cop it. Not when it had been
an attack on us, and we'd only been defending ourselves. And not when I was
still too weak to handle myself in jail. The Como bullets had ripped out all the
muscles in my right shoulder, torn out the median nerves and tendons in the top
of the arm making it as good as useless. So one morning I said goodbye to my
brothers and slipped out a balcony window. Donna, being a former nurse, took
me off to recuperate; eventually we ended up in Perth, while the rest of the
blokes ended up inside.
All up I spent a year and a half away from my Bandido brothers. But I'd
missed them. I felt bad that they were all in jail while I wasn't. From my home