Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs

by Thompson, Tony

  As the other British and Irish Angels realised what was going on, they rallied round to assist their fallen brother, pulling their man away. The Pagans did the same with Tank and soon the two sides were lined up opposite one another divided by a small patch of open ground. What had started out as a one-on-one dispute was about to become club-on-club.

  The last time the Pagans had fought the Angels the numbers had been even and they had come out on top, but this time they were hugely outnumbered. Despite this the idea of backing down never once occurred to them. ‘You lot can fuck off,’ Caz told them. ‘You’re not treating us like this. We’ve had it in England, and we’re fed up with it there. We’re not going to take it over here too.’ Bravado was one thing but it seemed clear that this time around that the Pagans were in for a severe battering.

  But the Angels’ antics during the show and throughout the rest of the country had earned them few friends. As word of the impending confrontation spread around the show site, members of the Devil’s Disciples rushed over and took up positions alongside the Pagans. So did the members of another Irish club, the Limerick-based Road Tramps (unrelated to the UK club of the same name). Dozens of ordinary punters, pissed off with being mistreated by the Angels, also lined up against them.

  Now the odds were almost even. Many of the Angels had knives, the others armed themselves as best they could with whatever they could find. Then, like a scene out of Braveheart, the air filled with screams and battle cries as the two massive armies suddenly rushed towards one another and smashed together in a mass of blood and guts and broken bones.

  Savage kicks and punches flew out in all directions. Bikers fell on both sides, some unconscious, others in terrible agony. Some donned crash helmets, lowered their heads and rushed at their opponents like deranged bulls. Faces were ripped and torn apart and opponents came together in terrible fury. The centre of the fight was pure chaos. Everyone was hitting everyone else, whoever was nearest. It was hard to tell friend from foe. Many of those with knives found they were unable to use them in such close quarters or ended up having them turned back on themselves.

  The noise of bone against bone, wood against bone and the screams of agony were almost unbearable. Link was whacked across the back with a lump of wood, Boone was virtually knocked out from a blow to the head. Dozens fell. Fountains of blood were spilled.

  The whole thing had lasted only a few seconds but in that time there had been dozens of appalling injuries. One of the Devil’s Disciples suffered a major stab wound as did at least two of the Angels. Dozens of bikers had major head wounds. There was a short pause – an eerie silence filled only by the groans of the wounded – as bodies were dragged from the battlefield and both sides regrouped. The hosts of the event, the Freewheelers, could only sit and watch the chaos taking place in front of them. A couple of smaller scuffles followed before it was clear that the situation had reached a stalemate and it was time to talk.

  But it was already too late. Although the biker gangs might like to have thought that they owned the place, the real power in Ireland at the time was still in the hands of the paramilitaries. Summoned by friends and relatives who had witnessed the goings on at the festival, they soon turned up in force, armed to the teeth, and demanded an explanation from the Freewheelers about what was going on.

  After that first meeting was concluded, the paramilitaries did their own research, walking around the site, keeping a low profile while speaking to locals and some of the other biker clubs, building up a full picture of what had taken place during the preceding hours. When they were satisfied, they arranged to have a second meeting with the Freewheelers. This had only been going on for a few minutes when a member of the Irish club emerged and asked the Pagans to attend the meeting as well.

  ‘All of what’s happened here, this entire problem, it’s all down to you lot,’ said the spokesman for the paramilitaries, pointing an accusing finger. ‘We know you didn’t cause it, but ultimately it’s down to you because you’ve brought something here that started out in England.

  ‘Now we don’t have a problem with you. We know you were trying to stand up for some of the locals and we’re grateful for that, but this thing needs to be sorted right now.’ After a few more discussions, the paramilitaries arranged for a meeting with the Hell’s Angels. ‘Basically you’ve got two choices,’ the leader of the paramilitaries told them in his thick brogue. ‘There’s a ferry leaving at eight am tomorrow. Either you and all your little friends get on it and you leave, or you stay here forever – six feet underground.

  ‘As of this moment, the Hell’s Angels no longer have a presence in Ireland. You’re finished as far as this place is concerned. Any of you lot that are still in the country tomorrow morning will be considered a legitimate target and I can guarantee you that you will never, ever leave. This is your one and only warning.’

  The Angels may have been a well-organised gang with strong international connections but, when it came to sheer efficiency, the paramilitaries had them beat hands down. At the same time that the meeting at Kilmeaden was taking place, two teams of heavily armed men wearing balaclavas simultaneously attacked the Angels clubhouses in Armagh and Dublin, ousting all the occupants and setting both buildings on fire.

  It was bad enough that the British Angels were being expelled, the fact that it happened during the World Run just made it all the more humiliating. The UK contingent were forced to go round to all of their esteemed guests from across the globe and tell them that the weekend had come to a premature end and that they would all be reconvening in England as a matter of urgency.

  Both Irish chapters were closed down immediately, their members either leaving the club or moving to England. It was the first time in the history of the Hell’s Angels that they had ever been forced to abandon one of their territories.

  The brawl that had led to the expulsion quickly achieved legendary status among the bikers throughout the Republic and the event was soon commemorated by one of the Freewheelers who had always had powerful literary aspirations. Within the space of a month he had composed an epic poem, ‘The Battle of Kilmeaden’ that read like a cross between Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Beowulf. A framed version of the poem can still be found inside the Freewheelers clubhouse.

  The huge fight started a powerful chain reaction no one could have foreseen. The Angels had always been feared and revered, achieving a near mythic status, but the fight had proved that, if they combined forces, the indigenous clubs were more than strong enough to take them on.

  In the months that followed, the bond between the Freewheelers, the Devil’s Disciples, the Road Tramps and another Irish MC, the Vikings, grew closer and closer until the clubs eventually formed the ‘Alliance Ireland’ – a group of MCs who had combined forces to ‘keep Ireland free of international biker politics’. In other words, to prevent the Hell’s Angels from ever setting foot in the Republic again.

  The Pagans remained at the Kilmeaden festival for the rest of the weekend, caring for their wounded and enjoying the festivities as best they could, trying hard not to think about the storm clouds that were now gathering on the horizon. As Boone, Link and the others rode back to the UK on the ferry, they all knew that they had finally sealed their fate.

  The previous altercation with the Angels had driven something of a wedge between the two clubs but now that had expanded into a gaping chasm. In the space of a year the Pagans had gone from potential Angel prospects to firm Angel enemies. Once the dust had settled, all that would remain would be a state of war.

  The Hell’s Angels were also thinking to the future. As soon as they got back they called a series of urgent national church meetings with representatives from every chapter called in to discuss the crisis. The Irish incident was just the latest in a long line of humiliations that the club had suffered. There was now a significant danger, as there had been following the incident on Chelsea Bridge in 1970, that the club’s charter might be withdrawn. If the UK
Angels were going to retain the right to wear the winged death’s head, they were going to have to prove themselves worthy.

  10

  REINCARNATION

  Just before nine pm on a Tuesday evening in March 1992, two full patch members of the Cycle Tramps, accompanied by their old ladies, emerged from the heavily fortified door of the gang’s clubhouse in Albert Road, Stechford. As they climbed into a nearby Ford Fiesta, a silver BMW screeched to a halt alongside the car. Guns appeared at the windows and at least twelve shots were fired before the attackers sped off.

  Twenty-four-year-old Francesca Fischer was hit in the arm and back and needed emergency surgery to save her life. Bullets also slammed into one of the bikers and the other woman but the fourth member of the group, Ricky Leak, miraculously escaped unscathed.

  Suspicions briefly fell on the gang’s old enemy, the Road Rats, before focusing instead on the nearby Wolverhampton chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Over the years the Cycle Tramps had worked hard to try to maintain good relations with the Big Red Machine, even changing the colours of their patches in order to avoid any antagonism. But ever since club president and co-founder Brewer had been shot dead in Hastings by a member of the Rats, the Angels seemed to have sensed a certain vulnerability and were slowly but surely trying to drive the gang out of existence.

  The Cycle Tramps were not the only ones under threat in the area. Since 1985 the Derbyshire-based Road Tramps had run the Rock and Blues Custom Show, which had rapidly grown to become the largest motorcycle and music festival in the north of England. Just as they had muscled their way into the small gathering run by the Wolf Outlaws at Long Marston and turned it into the generous cash cow which was the Bulldog Bash, so the Angels were now eyeing up the Rock and Blues with a view to making it their own, with or without the blessing of the Road Tramps.

  The Staffordshire Eagles had also clashed with the men from The Fort from time to time and, while the Leicester-based Pariah did not consider the members of the Wolverhampton club to be their enemies, they certainly didn’t see them as friends and tended to give them a very wide berth. In the meantime the once healthy and respectful relationship between the Warwickshire Pagans and the Angels had fallen apart as a result of the Battle of Kilmeaden, so it seemed a fair assumption that their names had also been added to the Wolvo’s hit list.

  Every patch holder in every club could see that, to all intents and purposes, the Angels were hell-bent on butting heads with every motorcycle gang in the Midlands area. The smart money agreed that it was only a matter of time before the opposition was completely wiped out.

  The attack on Albert Road may have brought the dispute to the attention of a far wider public but for those involved in the biker scene, the shooting was merely the most serious of a series of smaller spats involving the Angels and the Cycle Tramps that had been going on for more than a year.

  The initial solution had been to seek strength in numbers: events that had once been exclusive were increasingly being opened up to MCs from neighbouring counties, enabling the clubs to travel en masse and watch out for one another. As the weeks and months went by, strong friendships were forged among the members of the different factions and a sense of true camaraderie began to emerge.

  The idea for what happened next was not suggested from the top down – the egos of the officers of the MCs were far too fragile for them to want to propose anything so controversial. But the more the rank and file members of the clubs rode together, partied together and hung out with one another, the more obvious the way forward became: it soon came to seem like the most natural thing in the world.

  They all hated the Hell’s Angels and they were all being targeted for destruction. Individually they were weak and vulnerable. Strength and security lay in unity. If the biker clubs of the Midlands were going to survive, they were going to have to join forces on a permanent basis.

  The name was the last thing to be chosen. It had taken months of back-room machinations, innuendo and semi-secret negotiations for the Pagans, Cycle Tramps, Road Tramps, Staff Eagles, Pariah and Wolf Outlaws to finally agree to unify. But reaching a consensus on what they were going to call themselves and what their new patch would look like turned out to be almost as big a challenge as bringing them all together in the first place.

  The key stumbling block was that each club had its own proud history and every individual member had worked long and hard to earn their patches. No club was willing to throw away that kind of legacy without a fight, even in the face of imminent destruction. During the early days of discussion, the Cycle Tramps suggested that everyone simply join their club, as they were the oldest and largest. The Road Tramps and the Pagans made similar suggestions but it soon became clear that the only workable solution was to start afresh.

  Even this was not without its difficulties. After dozens of heated discussions in which the smaller clubs expressed particular concern about being railroaded down whatever route the larger clubs decided to go, an agreement was finally reached: they would accept any patch design just so long as it met two stringent conditions: it should not look anything like a Pagans patch and it should not look anything like a Cycle Tramps patch.

  Coming up with an acceptable design represented a significant challenge. The new colours had to be striking enough to show that the club meant business and intimidating enough to be worthy of the MC tag. Although no one in the new alliance would ever have admitted it in public, none of their individual patches had looked anywhere near as good as the Hell’s Angels infamous winged death’s head. Truth be told, some of them were pretty awful.

  The patch of the Staffordshire Eagles featured a large golden bird of prey sitting astride a skull, but it wasn’t particularly scary and behind their backs other MCs referred to the gang as ‘the budgies’. The Road Tramps had a hooded grim reaper as the centrepiece of their colours but it looked as though it had been produced by a small child using a blunt crayon; the Pariah favoured the head of a Viking, complete with horned helmet, which looked as though it had escaped from the pages of an Asterix cartoon. The Wolf Outlaws logo featured two joined heads – one a skull, one a salivating wolf – looking in opposite directions. It was a combination that drew a single response from all those that saw it: what the fuck is that supposed to be?

  The back patches of the Cycle Tramps and the Pagans were undoubtedly the best of a poor bunch (hence the collective objection) but still not anything to write home about. The Pagans featured a side-on view of a skull with no bottom jaw and a full head of flowing locks kept in place by a leather aviator helmet, while the Cycle Tramps had a crudely drawn forward-facing skull wearing an oversize, Native American-style headdress.

  Members with rudimentary design skills were sent away with a brief to come up with something that not only had a significant visual impact but also summed up some essential aspect of each original gang, as a way of keeping their legacy alive.

  What they eventually came back with was a grinning side-on skull with prominent fangs, a single, flowing lock of hair gathered into a pony tail and a tribal headdress composed of multi-coloured feathers. It was, in essence, the bastard child of the Cycle Tramps and the Pagans patches. For the smaller clubs the design would have been their worst nightmare made real, but for one single redeeming feature – it looked absolutely brilliant.

  The real clincher was the headdress itself: each feather was a different colour combination, based on the ones that had been used by the original gangs: blue and white for the Pagans, red and yellow for the Cycle Tramps, red and blue for the Road Tramps and so on. The overall colours for the new club would be black on yellow.

  The text for the bottom rocker of the patches had been agreed without too much fuss. It would read ‘Midlands’ – a territory that not only perfectly described the exact area occupied by the new club but had the added advantage of not encroaching on any existing MC. The nearest chapter of the Hell’s Angels had ‘Wolverhampton’ as their bottom rocker, a city that fell within the cou
nty known as the West Midlands. Although a strong chapter, it certainly wasn’t yet strong enough to lay claim to the whole region, let alone the west of it. The Angels wouldn’t like it that the new club had got there first, but they were just going to have to lump it.

  Choosing a name to appear on the top rocker took significantly longer. Dozens of suggestions were made and dozens were shot down in flames, often accompanied by peals of laughter. Everything from the Warpigs, the Cobras and the Leathernecks to the Iron Horses, the Misfits and the Skull Crew came up as suggestions but none of them quite seemed to fit. At the end of yet another futile meeting one patch holder shrugged his shoulders in frustration. ‘We should call ourselves the Outlaws, because at the end of the day that’s what we all are – outlaws.’

  A rumble passed through the room and heads bobbed in agreement like a miniature Mexican wave. A vote was taken and quickly passed with a massive majority. The Midland Outlaws had been born and were ready to stake their claim on the MC world.

  The only flies in the ointment were the Coventry Slaves. While the rest of the gangs in the Midlands area got on well with one another, the Slaves had never been particularly popular and had not been privy to the initial discussions. The Pagans in particular had never fully forgiven them for cooperating with the Ratae during the raid on the George Street clubhouse. The Slaves were considered something of a throwback, but because they were another MC it was agreed that they had to be treated to a modicum of respect.

  It was only when the formation of the new club was a foregone conclusion that they were informed about what had been going on behind their backs and offered the gentlest of ultimatums: either join forces with the new MC that was about to surround them on all sides or risk being destroyed by the Hell’s Angels. The Coventry Slaves quickly chose to throw their lot in with the newcomers and a seventh feather – black with a white tip – was added to the headdress of the Midland Outlaws back patch.