Traffic on the motorway came to a sudden halt as drivers did their best to avoid what many assumed was simply a horrific motorcycle accident. Only those who had seen the guns or heard the shots knew better. A middle-aged woman driving a BMW pulled up beside the fallen biker, removed a first-aid kit from her boot and went to tend to him. She found no pulse and realised there was nothing to be done.
An air ambulance and other emergency service vehicles were on the scene within minutes and, after speaking to eyewitnesses, quickly established that they were dealing with a murder. For Detective Superintendent Ken Lawrence, the police officer placed in charge of the investigation, the task ahead of him was a daunting one: his crime scene was four lanes wide and more than a mile long.
The road was sealed off in both directions, trapping around 400 vehicles. Experts from the Forensic Science Service were rushed in to examine Tobin’s wounds in situ, confirming that he had been shot from a moving vehicle. Volunteers from the Red Cross brought food, water and foil blankets for the stranded motorists, while police officers carried out a meticulous fingertip search of the motorway and checked the tyres of each and every car to ensure none of them had a spent cartridge caught in the tread. It was a high-risk tactic that eventually paid off when a .32 cartridge case from a self-loading pistol was discovered.
The excitement generated by that one piece of evidence did not last long. Det Supt Lawrence had never dealt with the Hell’s Angels before and found out the hard way that they do not cooperate with police, regardless of whether they are the victims or perpetrators of a murder. A key early line of enquiry was to establish whether Tobin was the victim of a random attack of whether he had been targeted specifically as a result of something he had done in his personal or professional life. However, not only would the Angels not provide anything but the most cursory information about their fallen brother, they also refused to allow police any access to his girlfriend, Rebecca Smith.
‘They do not talk to us, as witnesses and victims, they do not talk to us so sometimes we do not know what is really going on,’ lamented Det Supt Lawrence. ‘We are having great difficulty talking to his partner. They guard her very closely and won’t allow us to speak with her. We have no power to change that right now.’
It wasn’t as though the Angels didn’t have plenty to say: John ‘Bilbo’ Britt, a member of the biker club for more than thirty years and chief organiser of the Bulldog Bash was happy to speak to the press. ‘I knew the lad and you couldn’t wish to meet a better person. We’re used to deaths, as bikers. People die in accidents but we don’t expect someone to get shot. This is murder, plain and simple, and we have got no idea why this has happened … This year was a massive event and it went off virtually trouble-free. We had an amazing weekend and then this happened and it has totally shaken everybody. It’s a massive loss to the biker community as a whole.’
The minute the national officers of the Outlaws heard that a Hell’s Angel had been shot dead on the M40, they knew the south Warwickshire chapter were responsible. An emergency meeting was called and all chapter presidents were told to drop whatever they were doing and get themselves to Birmingham as quickly as possible. The alert level was immediately raised to the biker equivalent of DEFCON 1 (most severe) with an expectation of immediate retaliation.
Turner had been sidelined from the rest of the club in the expectation that he wouldn’t be able to cause much trouble. The revelations about what the chapter had been getting up to hit the rest of the club like a tsunami.
‘A few friends of the club from Cov have been getting in touch,’ Caz told the rest of his chapter after returning from the national officers meeting. ‘Those fucking idiots have been smoking crystal meth and abusing people left right and centre. They’ve even been taking pot shots at police cars. They’ve completely lost the plot. They should have been finished off before any of this happened. As of right now, we’re all targets.’
The enemy had their own sources of information too. At least two Angel hit squads were seen in the Coventry area in the days after Tobin’s death, hunting for Turner and his cohorts. In the Outlaws camp, standing orders were introduced, forbidding any member from staying in the same place for more than forty minutes without moving on. Members had to call in every two hours to let their local sergeant-at-arms know exactly where they were. Additional guards were posted at all clubhouses and increased security protocols were implemented. Only full members and prospects were allowed entry. CCTV cameras were scrutinised before anyone came in or left.
It didn’t matter if you wore your patches or not. Within a mile of the clubhouse, anyone on a customised chopper could be linked to the Outlaws and taken out. Members developed rituals to avoid being shot. Boone would jump on his bike and head off in one direction as quickly as possible then break, turn and head back the other way. He would take every possible short-cut, cut through traffic and generally drive like a lunatic. Once he was a mile away he would feel safe enough to drive normally but he was acutely aware of the target zone.
Members who felt their home addresses were too well known moved their families to safe houses as quickly as they could. Others chose to arm themselves. Plain-clothed Spotters were placed half a mile from the clubhouses, looking out for potential revenge attacks. No one expected the Angels to come by bike (too obvious and risky), instead the watchers were looking out for cars and vans. Club members were told to travel in pairs. Those considered to be remotely high risk would be provided with a security escort, even on their way to and from work. All the stops were pulled out to keep people as safe as possible.
For Boone and his fellow Outlaws there was little sympathy over the death of the Angel himself, the hardship was the realisation that their lives had been turned upside and that they did not have a say in this change of fortune. Going out for a ride and flying their patches, even in the heart of their own territory, was unthinkable. They were all targets for execution and, at least in the early days, their wives and children were just as much at risk as they were.
There was a certain degree of guilt among those who had turned a blind eye to everything that the south Warwickshire chapter were doing. Although every individual chapter of the Outlaws had the authority to carry out attacks on members of the Hell’s Angels, the idea was to ensure such incidents were kept as discreet as possible. Beating an Angel to within an inch of his life and taking his patches resulted in massive humiliation for the enemy but rarely if ever generated any kind of police response. Even if the authorities found out, the bikers would never talk and an investigation would immediately stall.
There had been times when Outlaws had gone out with the specific intention of murdering members of the Angels, in revenge for the shooting of Switch for example, but any hunting expeditions had always followed strict protocols to ensure nothing could be pinned on any individual member of the club. What the south Warwickshire chapter had done was so ill conceived it amounted to a massive tactical error, and a PR disaster.
It seemed that Turner and his gang could not have chosen a worse random victim. They had not only killed a Hell’s Angel. According to those who knew him outside the biker fraternity, Tobin was the closest thing to a real angel you could hope to find. Born in England, brought up in northern Alberta, Canada, in his youth Tobin had been a born-again Christian, who ‘used to have Bible talks at work in the mornings and prayer meetings in the afternoon,’ according to former colleague Tim Pogue.
He had lived in south east London, and worked as a mechanic in a Harley-Davidson dealership, since 1999. His comrades knew him as ‘Gentleman Gerry’. Police described him as ‘hard-working, friendly, but private’. He had no criminal record in England or Canada. And when his girlfriend Rebecca Smith appeared to the press, tearfully standing beside Marcus Berriman, president of the London chapter of the Hell’s Angels, she won the sympathy of a nation.
A statement read out on her behalf said: ‘Gerry was a thinking man, always ready and able to offer guidance and supp
ort to others, a true inspiration to many people, a charming personality whose quick-witted humour always kept everyone smiling. He was a rare breed of man with the heart of a lion and a soul filled with compassion and selflessness. Gerry was both a man of his word and a defender of his principles.
‘The nature of his untimely death due to a callous and cowardly act of violence from which it was impossible to defend himself, only accentuates further the pain and suffering that we are all experiencing due to this terrible loss.’ Over 3,000 Hell’s Angels from around the world attended his funeral.
Yet despite the palpable fear and dissent in the Outlaws camp, there was no question about what the official line would be once the perpetrators were fully identified: the club would back them every inch of the way, no matter what. ‘Your brother isn’t always right, but he is always your brother.’
Det Supt Ken Lawrence had fully expected a long and difficult investigation, the type that stretched on for months and months with little progress and repeatedly ran into brick wall after brick wall. He could not have been more wrong.
While the actual execution of Gerry Tobin had been carried out with a fair degree of slick professionalism, the cover up was utterly shoddy and amateurish to the nth degree. The investigating team knew the vehicle they were looking out for was a Rover 600 series, so when a burnt out model was found in a Coventry side street the day after the killing, alarm bells sounded. Although the fire had rendered the interior forensically useless, the serial number on the engine block allowed detectives to trace the registered owner. The details were false but when detectives looked to see who had owned the car before that, it turned out to be none other than Sean Creighton.
After that, the clues came thick and fast. Creighton and Dane Garside were seen on CCTV at a nearby petrol station wrapped in hats and warm clothes despite it being a a hot summer’s day. They were blatantly carrying out surveillance and had weapons concealed about their persons. Five days after the murder, a surveillance team followed Creighton as he met up with the rest of the south Warwickshire chapter of the Outlaws at the Tollgate Pub in Coundon where they sat outside and bought no drinks but took extensive notes during an intensive debriefing session.
A raid on the clubhouse in Coventry turned up two shotguns in a bag with Simon Turner’s fingerprints on them. More guns were found at Creighton’s home address. Police also found the dummy used for shooting practice. Within ten days of Tobin’s death, the entire chapter had been rounded up and charged with murder.
23
CALL TO ACTION
January 2008
Five months after Tobin’s murder, as the seven defendants waited on remand, it was business as usual for the ever-expanding AOA. A handful of Outlaws travelled from Birmingham to Alicante in order to help celebrate the launch of the newly formed Costa Blanca chapter. After a week of hard partying, they arrived back at the airport only to find a similar number of Hell’s Angels getting ready to board the same flight home.
None of the men were armed but, with each side hoping to gain the upper hand, a series of frantic phone calls was made to the UK, calling for reinforcements to meet the flight with as many weapons as they could get their hands on. Both gangs knew the score by now – nobody had forgotten the airport attacks in Denmark in which associates from both sides had been killed.
Some Outlaws – particularly those with good friends on the incoming flight – raced to the scene in order to defend their brothers. Others took perhaps a little more time than was necessary. Boone found himself dragging his heels. It was clear to him that the whole thing was going to be a disaster. Decisions were being made on the spot with no time to think about the consequences. The lack of preparation and lack of planning made it all wrong.
By the time flight ZB499 landed in Birmingham, more than thirty men from across the West Midlands had gathered at the airport. The fight took place in a link-way joining the two airport terminals, close to where the passengers emerge after clearing customs. With virtually no warning, those fresh off the plane met up with fellow gang members, grabbed their weapons and charged. Knives and meat cleavers as well as iron bars, knuckle dusters, hammers and even a tyre iron were all put to savage use as terrified families ran for cover. Witnesses even reported one man wielding a samurai sword.
The airport is patrolled by armed police, but the officers on duty felt that it was not safe to intervene and kept their distance. Remarkably only one of the bikers was critically injured in the clash. Boone felt grateful that at least the Coventry boys were being held on remand for the Tobin murder. Had they been at liberty, no doubt they would have been first on the scene and the carnage would have been far worse.
Twelve bikers were eventually brought to court. The average age of the seven Outlaws in the dock was forty-seven, the eldest being fifty-one and the youngest forty-four. (At forty-one-years-old, Boone still found himself one of the younger members of the club.) By contrast, the Angels had spent the months before the battle recruiting heavily – the average age of their defendants was forty, with the youngest aged just twenty-eight.
The new Angels were not necessarily bikers at heart, but they had enough of an interest to allow them to be fast-tracked into the club. Many were thought to be actively involved in drugs and gun dealing, all part of an effort by the Angels to establish themselves further in the UK market and to boost their fighting strength in the aftermath of the murder of Gerry Tobin. Boone’s appetite for violence and destruction wasn’t what it used to be, and yet it was obvious that the war was going to continue and that there would be more clashes in the future – clashes in which the Outlaws were likely to find themselves up against men who were considerably younger and fitter.
Inevitably, recriminations bounced around the club. Those Outlaws who had failed to make it to Birmingham on time were questioned about just how hard they had tried. So far as Boone was concerned, the only real winners from the situation had been the police and it was daft for the gang to keep losing members to prison. But Outlaw rules state that a call to action must be answered; fines were issued and a couple of members were busted back to prospect for failing to respond in time.
The Outlaws came under increasingly intense scrutiny. In March 2008, Outlaw David Melles was arrested in Gloucestershire after police found an armoury of illegal guns at his home. The fifty-two-year-old grandfather had stashed a sawn-off and pump action shotgun, a Derringer pistol, dum dum bullets and other ammunition at his house near Stroud. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
In May 2008, Derbyshire Constabulary received intelligence that the Hell’s Angels were planning a retaliatory attack against the Outlaws at the Rock and Blues show that year. The twenty-fifth anniversary show was set to have a great line-up, but the police’s objections were sufficient to force the organisers to retract their application for a premises licence.
The club were stunned – the Rock and Blues was a major money earner for the Outlaws. Without it, they would have to find other ways of swelling the coffers – and so far as the senior officers were concerned, this meant stepping up their involvement in the drug trade. Boone decided to take a back seat in the numerous operations that were going on around. Enough was enough; he had no desire to go back to prison.
The trial of the seven men accused of the murder of Gerry Tobin was scheduled to begin on 3rd October 2008. The day before the jury was sworn in, Sean Creighton changed his plea.
The sergeant-at-arms of the south Warwickshire chapter of the Outlaws claimed that he alone had murdered Gerry Tobin. It soon became clear that this was a tactical move aimed at giving the rest of the chapter the chance of getting off scot-free. Creighton also claimed that, rather than being sergeant-at-arms, he was in fact president of the chapter and the only one with the authority to arrange and order such a murder.
Turner took full advantage of his comrade’s confession and told the court that he had been working at an industrial unit on the day of the killing but had handed over his phone to
Creighton, neatly explaining why the police had traced his mobile signal along the same route the killers took. Turner added that he had been suspended from the chapter after arguing with other members at a motorcycle repair unit in Coventry, just a few hours before Tobin was shot.
He was unable to explain how plastic bags containing two shotguns were found at his workplace, with his fingerprints on them. When prosecutor Timothy Raggatt QC asked if the fingerprints were an unhappy coincidence, he replied: ‘My whole life seems to be an unhappy coincidence.’
Turner also told the court that co-defendant Malcolm Bull had insulted his fellow Outlaws by making statements to the police because the Outlaws Rule 14 imposed a strict ‘no comment’ policy on its members. ‘Everything about Mr Bull is disreputable to me,’ Turner told the court. ‘[He] has turned on everything that we are – he has brought us to this junction in our life.’
With Creighton prepared to take the rap, the rest of the Outlaws claimed ignorance of the shooting, saying that they thought they were just carrying out a surveillance operation aimed at the Thames Valley Coalition, a loose grouping of bikers that includes the Wessex and Windsor branches of the Hell’s Angels as well as the Windsor 81 support club and the Patriots MC, a gang from south Wales with whom the Outlaws have been at odds for some years. It was a plausible explanation.
Both Turner and Dane Garside claimed to have been unimpressed by the surveillance idea but, as loyal chapter members, they had to follow orders. Discipline was strict, according to Garside. He had already been ‘busted back to probate’ for not answering a telephone call, and he had been a member of the club for less than a year.
Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs Page 26
