Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs

by Thompson, Tony

  They got their first opportunity a couple of months later when Big Jim Nolan, president of the fearsomely brutal South Florida chapter of the Outlaws, heard that three Angels from Lowell, Massachusetts were in town. One of these, Albert ‘Oskie’ Simmons, had left the club in ‘bad standings’ before drifting down to Florida. The other two, Edwin ‘Riverboat’ Riley and ‘Whiskey George’ Hartman, both of whom were wanted for murder, had tailed Simmons to the sunshine state to supervise the covering up of his Angel tattoos – required action for all those leaving the club under a cloud.

  The Outlaws confronted the trio and Riverboat and Whiskey explained that they were not wearing their colours out of respect for the fact that they knew they were in Outlaw territory. Seemingly impressed by this gesture, the Outlaws invited the Angels back to their clubhouse where they all drank and partied until the early hours. At which point, the atmosphere changed. The smiles and laughter suddenly gave way to frowns and scowls. The Outlaws chatted among themselves and agreed that they shouldn’t be drinking with the scum who were responsible for beating one of their beloved brothers half to death.

  Their guests were swiftly tied up and loaded into a van by four Outlaws, including Norman ‘Spider’ Risinger, then driven to a flooded quarry pit near Andytown. There they were made to kneel down facing the water, arms tied behind their backs and concrete blocks attached to their legs. Risinger then shot each man in turn through the back of the head with a 12-gauge shotgun and pushed their bodies into the water. The trio of corpses were discovered just a few days later when a passing motorist spotted a foot with a blue sock bobbing up and down in the water.

  The Angels launched their own investigation into the murders; fearful that their guys had in fact been killed by the police, in order to set one club against another. It didn’t take long to establish that the Outlaws were truly to blame and, at a national meeting in Cleveland attended by representatives from all chapters, the Hell’s Angels declared all-out war on their rivals.

  The Outlaws were more than ready to fight. When the Florida chapter suspected those on the fringes of the biker world of gathering home addresses of full patch members for the Angels, they kidnapped the ‘snitches’, tied them up and dunked them into tubs of water into which were dipped live electrical wires. When the terrified victims still refused to talk, they were taken out into the swampland of the Everglades and made to dig their own graves. When they still refused to talk, the Outlaws finally realised that the people they had abducted were actually innocent after all.

  Chicago-based Harry ‘Stairway’ Henderson, National President of the Outlaws, ordered that all Florida clubhouses were to be surrounded with cinderblock walls equipped with gunports. Guards were posted twenty-four hours a day and clubhouses had to be stocked with enough weapons and ammunition to fight off enemies. (In the mobile home that served as HQ for the south Florida chapter, the weapons were hidden inside a box of children’s toys.) The precautions proved well worthwhile. In 1975, the Hell’s Angels launched frantic machine gun attacks on Outlaw clubhouses in Atlanta, Jacksonville, south Florida and Ohio but no members were injured.

  Soon every Outlaw clubhouse featured a sign reading ‘All Hell’s Angels Must Die’ and ‘ADIOS’ (Angels Die In Outlaw States) became a popular motto alongside the favourite, ‘God Forgives, Outlaws Don’t’. Schedules were reorganised and one member from each chapter was assigned to collect all the old ladies and girlfriends from their jobs, rather than each member picking up his own. The move ensured there were always enough people in each clubhouse to fend off a potential attack.

  Outlaws from northern chapters were transferred south but told not to wear their colours so they could gather intelligence. Stairway Harry also ordered members to get rid of their stolen motorcycles and any other obvious contraband so they minimised their chances of being arrested. Every available man was needed to fight and the Outlaws didn’t want to lose anyone for the sake of petty crime. Members were expected to contribute to a war fund to buy guns, explosives and grenades. At a training camp in the Everglades later that year, a former US navy commando taught attendees how to use explosives and set booby traps.

  The Angels were on the attack too. Clarence ‘Addie’ Crouch and two other members from the Cleveland chapter set up a hit at an Outlaw meeting. Crouch was armed with a shotgun while his two partners in crime carried a machine gun and a .45 pistol.

  ‘There was a bunch of people standing outside and it was dark and we pulled up and stopped and the machine gun opened up, and I started shooting. I shot a window out, I shot a bike, I shot up the driveway and I hit somebody. It turned out to be a seventeen-year-old kid.’

  Crouch redeemed himself in 1976 while in Memphis. ‘I was in a tattoo shop getting a tattoo on my arm and a lot of Outlaws walked in. One had “Outlaws, Memphis” on his back with their centre logo. I put eighty stitches in his back with a big X through it. I made him an X member. Ha ha.’

  The state of war and inherent danger did nothing to slow the global expansion of the MC scene. In Canada, a major Hell’s Angel stronghold, four chapters of the Satan’s Choice MC patched over to become Outlaws in the spring of 1977. Outlaws from across America clubbed together to provide machine guns and grenades for their new brothers.

  With three heavily armed Hell’s Angels chapters nearby, the two Outlaws chapters in North Carolina – one in Charlotte, the other in Lexington – were always on a higher war footing than most. Midway between Miami and New York, maintaining a firm grip on the area was key to being able to run drugs between the two cities. Neither gang wanted to lose out. Both sides reinforced heavily. The Outlaws surrounded one of their clubhouses with a twelve-foot high fence reinforced with concrete on both sides and called it Fort Lexington. The Angels replaced the windows of their clubhouse in Charlotte with gun slits and called it The Alamo.

  In the summer of 1979, sixteen-year-old Bridgette ‘Midget’ Benfield was well on her way to becoming an Outlaw old lady. She had begun seeing William ‘Waterhead’ Allen, a full patch member of the gang’s Charlotte chapter and soon decided to run away from home to be with him. She called her parents every few days but refused to come home, assuring them that she was all right. But then, in a call made at the beginning of July, five-foot nothing Bridgette sounded as though things had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Mama, I’m into something,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll help,’ her mother Sue replied. ‘Tell us.’

  ‘I can’t. I got into it. I have to get out.’

  In the early hours of 4th July, Chapter President William ‘Chains’ Flamont returned to the Charlotte clubhouse and found a gruesome scene. Allen was slouched on a seat on the porch, a gun nestled in his lap and a bullet hole in his head. Inside the house, Bridgette, Outlaws William ‘Mouse’ Dronenburg and Leonard ‘Terrible Terry’ Henderson, and club associate Randall Feazell were also dead. They had been hit with shots fired from outside the house then finished off with shots to the head from close range.

  At least two suspects wielding a 9mm and a .223 semi-automatic fired around forty shots. It looked like Allen was talking to one of his killers when they opened fire on him. The others probably woke to the sound of the shots but were unable to react quickly enough to escape. The shooting lasted less than fifteen seconds. It remains the worst mass murder in Charlotte history and the case is unsolved to this day.

  Following the killings, the Outlaws moved their Charlotte clubhouse to North Mecklenburg, a mostly black section of town, on the basis that the snowy white faces of any Angels that came snooping around would stand out like sore thumbs.

  Both the bitter rivalry and the body count continued to grow across the world over the years that followed. By the time the Midland Outlaws unveiled themselves, the UK was one of the few places left on the planet that the war between the two gangs had yet to touch. But all that was about to change.

  12

  PAYBACK

  The spectre of sudden, violent death is a constant backdrop to the lives o
f one percenters all over the world. Inter-gang feuds and disputes account for some of the casualties, chronic conditions like cirrhosis that develop from a lifetime of hard partying are responsible for others, but in both cases the proportion is small. Without doubt, the most common cause of a fatality within the MC community is a road accident.

  It’s not that club members are bad riders – far from it: speeding along in neat formation is nowhere near as easy as it looks and, in most clubs, it is impossible to progress from prospect to full member without demonstrating that you have the required skills to barrel down a motorway at eighty or ninety miles an hour with fellow bikers just a few feet in front and behind.

  Even when riding alone, the hours that club members spend on two wheels – along with a certain propensity for large quantities of drugs and alcohol – sharply increases their chances of being involved in some kind of incident. In May 2000, the legendary Maz Harris, a Hell’s Angel with so much experience that he regularly tested new models for Harley Davidson, died after ploughing a 1200cc Buell into a crash barrier on the A2. He was fifty-years-old and just a month away from his wedding.

  So many members die in this way that the walls of every clubhouse are adorned with pictures of those who are ‘gone but not forgotten’. Some members even wear special patches in remembrance of fallen brothers that they were particularly close to.

  Long before the formation of the Midland Outlaws, back even before the shooting of Rabbi, a prominent long-standing member of the Pagans had ended up a paraplegic as a result of a serious motorcycle accident – a powerful reminder to the rest of the club that not all such incidents are fatal. Since joining the club Boone had been to at least one funeral a year and sometimes many, many more.

  Funerals – which count as mandatory runs for all chapter members – are elaborate, highly ritualised affairs involving mile-long processions of riders who remove their helmets as a mark of respect and rev their engines in unison in order to send their brother to the great chapter in the sky. Popular or high ranking members can have hundreds attending their services. For Maz Harris the number reached well over 1,000, with attendees flying in from all over the world.

  With the former Pagans now members of a much larger organisation, the number of accidents (some major, some minor) seemed to soar and quickly reached the point where someone, somewhere, was always in hospital recovering from a crash.

  On one particularly horrific occasion, one of the Midland Outlaws was coming back from a night out, with his old lady riding pillion. He went to overtake a vehicle in front just as a lorry carrying an earthmover was travelling in the opposite direction. The load was a little too wide for the vehicle and stuck out a little on each side. The Outlaw only just managed to squeeze through the gap.

  ‘Ow!’ gasped the old lady.

  ‘What’s up babe?’

  ‘I think that JCB might have caught me on the arm.’

  Stopping off to check whether the glancing blow had done any damage, he found her right arm had been cleanly torn off at the shoulder. It had all happened so fast that she had felt nothing more than a hard pinch.

  The inherent dangers of riding as part of a group cannot be underestimated. A brief lapse of concentration or a simple error of judgement can quickly lead to a mass pile-up. The density of the biker pack means that the consequences of any such accident are almost always catastrophic.

  During the tenth anniversary ride of the San Diego-based Saddle Tramps MC, an oncoming vehicle lost control and ploughed into the heart of their formation. Four Saddle Tramps died and five more were seriously injured. Similarly, when members of the Brother Speed Motorcycle Club were riding en masse along the I-5 freeway in Oregon and traffic suddenly slowed down ahead of them, all hell broke loose. Three bikes crashed immediately and those behind couldn’t avoid the collision. In total twenty-six bikes were involved in the pile-up and there were dozens of serious injuries. Miraculously, only one club member died of his injuries.

  One spring, after the usual boozing and brawling of their first run of the year, the Midland Outlaws decided to take the long way home, driving up through north Wales and across the Horseshoe Pass. It was raining as they made their way up the pass but this soon turned to sleet and then by the time Boone and the others were on their way down the other side it had started to snow and conditions had become horrendous.

  Of the twenty-eight Outlaws on the run, twenty-two came off their bikes on the way down the pass. Boone took a bend too fast for the conditions and skidded sideways into a tree. Link jumped off his bike and let it roll into a ditch, the only way he could possibly control it. Caz put his bike into top gear and used the clutch as a brake to descend the slope as slowly as possible. Halfway down, he heard a scream from behind: ‘Get out of the way, get out of the fucking way.’ Dozer had decided to do the whole thing at full speed and to the surprise of everyone made it safely to the bottom – they all found it hilarious.

  As the weather started to improve, a spirit of mischievousness descended on the group. While riding in close formation, those who had already fallen off their bikes would attempt to kick those who hadn’t in order to make them do the same. In the meantime, those at the back of the line found themselves constantly dodging and weaving around the detritus – wing mirrors, passenger pegs, heat shields – that fell off the damaged bikes. Spirits were high. No one was seriously hurt and none of the bikes were seriously damaged. It was just another anecdote they could tell their friends at the next rally.

  At the back of their minds though, every biker felt that it was only a matter of time before they got themselves into a proper accident. There was simply no way to predict who was going to be next or how badly hurt they would end up. So when the news came in March 1993 that Switch, Boone’s sergeant-at-arms, had come off his bike, the rest of the Warwickshire chapter rushed to the hospital, bracing themselves for the worst.

  Switch was lying on a bed at the far end of a busy ward, half propped up by a couple of pillows, looking battered and bruised, especially on his chest and legs where his bike seemed to have rolled over him after he crashed. He was clearly in a great deal of pain.

  ‘What on earth happened?’ asked Boone.

  ‘I dunno,’ came the reply, ‘I just came off. One minute I was going along, the next I was on the ground looking up at the sky.’

  It made no sense. Switch wasn’t just a good rider; he was excellent, one of the most experienced in the club. He was also as tough as old boots, a former soldier who had been through multiple tours of Northern Ireland during the height of the troubles.

  ‘Did you hit something in the road?’ asked Caz.

  Switch shook his head, grimacing from the pain.

  ‘Was there something wrong with the bike? Did you have a blowout?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I would have known. I just came off.’

  The club members looked at one another, their foreheads crinkled with concentration.

  ‘Were you on a corner, was there oil on the road?’

  ‘Nah, I was in a straight line. The last thing I remember was being overtaken by a sports bike. After that I went down.’

  Caz paused for a moment then, moving with a sense of urgency, made his way over to the other side of the bed and picked up the patches that the nurses had removed from their patient and placed over the back of a chair. He held them up to the light. Two small holes were clearly visible through the leather fabric, one in the centre, the other higher and to the right.

  ‘Jesus, mate,’ gasped Caz, ‘you’ve been fucking shot. Twice.’

  A doctor was quickly summoned and, with the aid of two nurses, gently turned Switch over in the bed to inspect his back. Having assumed that he had simply been the victim of a motorcycle accident they had focused on his more obvious injuries, never expecting there to be anything more.

  As Switch growled with pain, his back was exposed and the two small bullet wounds, one in the shoulder, one closer to the centre of his lower back, were plain for
all to see, even amid the large number of lacerations and bruises. ‘Looks like a .22,’ said Boone, ‘a real assassin’s weapon. Lucky they didn’t have anything bigger otherwise you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.’

  The doctor, a middle-aged Indian man with small, round spectacles, turned to the group. ‘I’m afraid I will have to inform the police about this.’

  At a signal from Caz, Boone pulled the curtains around Switch’s bed, isolating him from the rest of the ward. The nurses made themselves scarce while Caz stood face to face with the doctor, towering over him and invading his personal space.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I really should. These are gunshot wounds.’

  ‘Listen mate, there’s no law in this country that says you have to report this to anyone. It’s entirely your own discretion. I’m sure the police would like you to report it, but that doesn’t mean you have to. And I’ll tell you one thing, if you even look like you’re going to report this, I’ll pick my mate up and we’ll walk out of here right now and whatever happens to him will be on your conscience forever. And if anything bad happens, all of us lot are going to hold you personally responsible. You understand?’

  The doctor looked at each of the faces of the bikers surrounding the bed and saw that they were deadly serious. He also knew that they were right about the law (reporting of gunshot wounds by doctors was not made compulsory in the UK until 2004), which left him with no options. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll just treat him. Nothing more.’