ADAM SHAND
February 14, 2009 08:30am
BIKIES have been called our most heinous criminals. But at a rare meeting of rival gangs, members insist they are not all bad.
THE headquarters of the Descendants Motorcycle Club is neutral ground for Adelaide’s outlaw bikies, but there’s still tension as they roll their machines through the big, black iron gates.
At the bar, the five Rebels members stand away from the rest and stay in their tight circle. Hells Angels and Finks, the memories of recent conflicts still fresh, keep a discreet distance apart, separated by a patchwork of colours around the corner of the bar – Gypsy Jokers, Descendants and even some Christian bikies, the Longriders.
It’s early in the evening and the 30 men maintain a studied coolness. The setting is suitably dark and foreboding with medieval battle axes and daggers lining the walls and the Descendants’ club motif, the mythical Gryphon with eagle head on a lion’s body, watching over.
Just to be here is remarkable; there are brawls that go back decades between these groups. One ill-chosen word, a misinterpreted gesture, even a spilt drink and the place could ignite.
If, as members believe, police eavesdrop through hidden listening devices in their clubs, you wonder what they will be making of this unprecedented gathering. Each club has taken a risk to be here, but they’ve done so because they feel there’s a big principle at stake – the survival of all the club patches they wear.
They are meeting to explore the things that unite rather than divide them, and to understand how their peculiar ethos of brotherhood, with its tolerance of crime, has brought them into conflict with society.
“F*** me,” says a 25-year veteran of one club, before draining the first of countless beers. “We’ve punched on with some of these clubs and here we are drinking with ‘em. Never thought I’d see this.”
All these clubs face extinction under Premier Mike Rann’s new Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act. Police Commissioner Mal Hyde has sought the declaration of the Finks Motorcycle Club as a criminal gang and, if Attorney-General Michael Atkinson agrees, the Finks could be issued with control orders and face up to five years’ jail for meeting again.
Police say the Finks are set up for crime and almost all have serious convictions. A lawyer for the Finks, Craig Caldicott, says that’s not true. He claims 80 per cent of the members have convictions that are mostly for minor or old crimes and only a few have been jailed for serious crimes.
Clearly, the bikies are worried; subsequently, they are more accessible. For the first time, they are discussing the make-up of their membership. The Descendants’ founder, 54-year-old Tom Mackie, claims the police have yet to prove clubs are set up for the purpose of organised crime.
“This is really an attempt to regulate who we can associate with,” he says. “It’s Big Brother determining our friendships which most people in a democracy would find pretty ordinary.”
One result of the Government campaign has been to politicise and to some extent unite the bikie leadership. Many are founding members of a new political group, the FREE (Freedom Rights Educate Environment) Australia Party, which has recently applied for registration.
One possible advantage of setting up a political party is that it may allow outlawed bikies to meet under the banner of political association, which is excluded from the new law.
The irony of the meeting this night is not lost on the bikies. A law designed to isolate and marginalise club members is actually bringing them together. An interclub ride in Adelaide late last year broke the ice, leading to the January meeting.
From this, a loose coalition of club elders has been formed. If issues arise between clubs, the elders will act as a contact point to prevent hostilities.
With long gray locks and goatee beard, Mackie looks the image of the bikie elder. He works at an Adelaide entertainment venue and plays soccer dad to a brood of kids in his spare time. Mackie has earned respect from other clubs for the success and stability of the Descendants.
That’s why the clubs agreed to meet there. Mackie asked clubs to bring younger members so they can learn how to deal with other patches. The tension between clubs has meant they have almost forgotten how to mix, he explains.
There are disputes between clubs here that are neither forgiven nor forgotten, some of them misunderstandings that have hardened into hostility. There has rarely been an opportunity like this to look each other in the eye and resolve the past.
This reporter watches as two clubs with a history of animosity clear up outstanding business that has lingered for years. By the end of the night, members of the two clubs are trading jokes over the bar.
Mackie nods approvingly. There’s been enough blood spilt. It takes greater strength to resolve conflicts in peace and goodwill, he says. “If these fellas can get on and talk, sort out problems before they get out of hand, then there’s no reason for pissed fights to become gunfights,” he says.
While the media may talk of turf wars over drugs, the bikie leaders claim the spark for most conflicts is the over-consumption of alcohol. They claim they spend much of their time not planning crime but preventing trivial matters escalating into violence. While that’s not the view of police, it is true that members are expected to back up their mates – a fight over nothing in a pub can lead to a full-scale war as the troops are roused from bed all over town.
“We are many things that they say we are, but we are not all of them,” Mackie insists. “We believe it’s time to just gently point out a few truths, to prevent public opinion from being manipulated against us.”
Still, bikie leaders admit that members have used the power of the patch to indulge in extortion and standover, even as they claim it’s a minority. In isolation from the wider world, some aspects of club culture have become rotten and need to be overhauled.
There is ample evidence of criminality but little showing it is centrally organised inside the clubs. Recent history suggests that bikie-related crime is carried out by groups of two and three in concert with outsiders. There are cases before the courts in whichbikies are alleged to have been involved in extortion, intimidation, loan sharking and drug distribution, but police are yet to prove that any club leadership has directed or controlled those criminal enterprises.
Clearly this meeting is a chance for some positive public relations for the clubs, but there is also a desire for peace among the wiser heads. Gradually, goodwill has built up between the senior members in the room. It began when the Finks responded to a letter from this reporter, then writing for The Bulletin magazine, seeking access to the club. A small group of senior members led by “Charlie”, then sergeant at arms for the Finks north chapter, could see the future.
Unlike most clubs, which have a hierarchical structure headed by three or four office bearers, the Finks have only a sergeant-at-arms, little more than a convenor of the 35 members. (The police believe there are 46 members.) Every member is as powerful as the next, with all issues resolved through a vote carried unanimously.
Most clubs have a membership divided between those who spend regular stints in jail and those with only minor or no criminal histories. This can cause tension. Clubs have to deal with such factions, some more successfully than others. There is often a split between those who see membership as an expression of freedom and those who use it for their own, sometimes criminal, ends.
For the leaders at this meeting, the 1 per cent badge on their colours doesn’t automatically denote a criminal connection. It proclaims an alienation from the other 99 per cent of motorcycle riders and their desire for brotherhood.
There are people with serious criminal histories in the room, but membership was not the starting point for such activity, Charlie says.
Charlie joined the Finks 13 years ago to indulge his passion for building and riding motorcycles, his love of a good party and a fight. However distasteful the bikie culture was to others, it was something to believe in.
In the early 1990s there was a bike show or a party to attend as a club every weekend. Different clubs mingled and although there were occasional brawls they rarely ended in gunfire. It seems like a distant memory. Clubs today avoid the few parties that are held and if they attend they claim they encounter more undercover cops than outlaw bikies.
The Finks were the only club to take up this reporter’s 2005 invitation for dialogue and it’s continued over the past four years, some of the most turbulent in the club’s 40-year history. Three members have died, either through murder or misadventure. There has been a simmering war with the Hells Angels, culminating in the wild gunfight at the Royal Pines Resort in Queensland, the infamous Ballroom Blitz of March, 2006, which left three men shot and two stabbed.
So is the Government’s assault on the bikies going to work? In the past year, almost every club has lost members as the state has stepped up its war. If Rann manages to ban all the clubs it will presumably put them out of business.
Not so, claim the bikie leaders. It will drive the problem underground and push out some reasonable men who have restrained the loose cannons from committing violence and other criminal acts, Mackie says. Bikies who have stayed out of jail in the past 15 years have prospered just as the rest of the community has, he says.
It might surprise people to know that one senior Fink has sat on a government committee for nearly a decade with the knowledge of a Cabinet minister. “We are not hiding, nor promoting criminal activity; our business lives have nothing to do with our membership of this club,” insists one Fink as he shows SA Weekend through his new warehouse.
Some Finks have taken an even higher-profile approach. When Rann threatened to run every bikie out of South Australia, Finks life member Robbie White protested by having “The Finks” tattooed across his throat. Now he’s gone further and covered half of his face with a tribal motif. “It’s an anthropological experiment,” he says. “I want to be able to gauge people’s reactions to me. I want them to know I am a Fink through and through but that no matter how I look, there is no reason to fear me.”
The recent daacetente in bikie land doesn’t mean they will suddenly conform, but they argue they can be pro-community. The FREE Australia party has been investigating allegations of child sex abuse and murder based on the confessions of a pedophile in custody in South Australia. Even as the anti-bikie squad has been applying pressure to FREE members, the group has been prepared to give qualified assistance to the Major Crime squad, handing over potentially important evidence and providing statements.
As the night wears on, this reporter strikes up a conversation with “Brett”, one of the Descendants nominees who have been tirelessly serving food and drinks. This bespectacled, clean-cut man seems an unlikely outlaw – he has no tattoos or even earrings. He works a 9 to 5 job in middle management. He has three kids and a wife. He did not join the Descendants to be a crim but because he loves motorcycles. He’s been hanging round the club for 15 years, but has only been “nommed” in the past year. There’s a popular myth that a nominee must commit a crime to gain their patch, but Brett denies this emphatically.
That Brett can find a place in the Descendants is a measure of where the club has arrived at after 34 years. Tom Mackie and his brother Perry founded the club in the mid-1970s after arriving from New Zealand. The Mackies grew up in South Auckland, where Maori gangs ruled the streets. It was a brutal environment. Mackie jokes that he never won a fight until he got to Australia.
The Descendants quickly made a name for themselves in Adelaide and Mackie admits they got carried away by their notoriety. With bikie violence and petty crime rising, the State Government established a bikie squad and enacted harsh consorting laws very similar to the Rann Government’s SOCCA laws.
Soon Mackie and other club mates were sentenced to short prison sentences for consorting (mixing with other convicted criminals). In jail, they began to mix with the hardest criminals in the state. They came out of jail and continued to consort. Nominees began to come from jail and before long the membership was criminalised, Mackie says.
“We were having new members introduced to the club from jail and their values influenced the club’s values.”
Gradually, the Descendants claim to have returned to the motorcycle, competing in drag racing and bike building, and they claim the hardcore criminal element has all but gone.
Clubs, such as the Gypsy Jokers and Descendants, that dictate that members meet a minimum number of days in the saddle are more stable than those that don’t.
Clubs that have successfully banned members from using or selling crystal methamphetamine are in better shape too. Discipline will be the key to survival.
Mackie is cautiously optimistic that bikie clubs will survive this latest attempt to rub them out, but adds they must recognise times have changed. They were happy to wear the outlaw tag to build their own legend, but it has outlived its usefulness.
“What was acceptable 30 years ago may not be today,” he says. “We need to redefine and return to the values that created the clubs in the first place.”
