Heavy Duty Attitude (11 page)
So I told him.
Some, not all.
That I’d seen Wibble.
‘It’s like their coming out event he says.’
‘Coming out event? What do you mean?’ Bob asked.
‘They’ve joined forces and patched over.’
‘Patched over?’ he demanded, ‘patched over to what?’
I gave him the one word answer.
‘Mohawks.’
‘He said they’ve gone over to the Mohawks.’
‘I heard,’ he said.
It was just about the ‘Oh shit’ reaction I had been expecting.
‘Mohawks?’ he checked, ‘you’re sure he said Mohawks?’
‘Oh sorry, my mistake,’ I said sarcastically, ‘I’m only a journalist so I’m not used to listening to what people tell me, you’ve just reminded me, actually he said the brownies. Of course I’m sure.’
‘Problem?’ I asked. ‘What do you think? Is this as big a problem as I think it is?’
‘Oh no problem,’ he replied, ‘it’s not what you’d call a problem as such. Just more like all out fucking war, that’s all.’
It’s what I had thought too, but now I was hearing it from the police. ‘That serious?’
‘Yes it’s that serious. The Mohawks have had a Manx chapter for a while now, but them having some bods stuck out on the Isle of Man was something the other senior clubs might not like but could tolerate.’
I was about to ask what the hell for since I didn’t see that The Mohawks would be interested in fishing, tourism and the TT, when Bob filled me in anyway.
On the face of it the idea that an ambitious up and coming outlaw biker gang would have a great interest in international bankers seemed funny at the outset, but then given recent financial history you might think they probably had more in common than at first appeared. And of course The Mohawks’ interest in international banking would be a purely business one in terms of what it could do for them when it came to moving and laundering money. As I’d found from talking to Damage, the bikers could be quite sophisticated when it came to the intricacies of dummy companies, offshore trusts and the attractiveness of bearer bonds; all a long way from the popular image of having no interests other than stripping down and rebuilding a knucklehead while drinking crates of booze, eating handfuls of pills and looking forward to the next shag or fight, whichever came first.
But Bob was still talking. ‘Patching over a couple of serious regional firms like Dead Men Riding and Capricorn to give them a mainland presence and territory, now that’s something different. That lobs a huge fucking rock into the local pool and all sorts of shit is going to wash up as a result.’
‘Of course it does. Listen, The Brethren and The Rebels have had their slots for years now, and since your bloody
pax Damage
they’ve been getting on with business with territories sorted out. They may not be best buddies still but they’ve had an increasingly good working relationship for years.
pax Damage
, I thought?
‘But add the Mohawks into the mix and who knows where it will end? What was a two way national carve up at their level is suddenly up for grabs as a three way one. And how do you think it looks to the yanks back in the mother clubs who authorise their local charters? Part of the deal with the local guys over here will have been a quid pro quo. You get your charter and your patches but you have to prove you are top dog locally at your level. Now another senior club shows up, it’s up to The Brethren and to a lesser extent The Rebels, as it was an attack against a Brethren event, to show they are still top dog or…’
Or what the implications would be, I added. It was incredible to think about it. I knew The Brethren had pulled individual local clubs’ charters before, setting in train vicious dogfights as the remaining charters’ members hunted down the offending ex brothers to reclaim the patches for the club. But never so far as I was aware had they ever done it to a whole country’s charter. Christ alone knew what would happen then. Expulsion from the worldwide Brethren network would be a stunning blow for the local charters, not just from a personal and standing point of view but also for the disruption it would cause to their existing international business arrangements and networks. Would it be an open season, I wondered? Would you see Brethren and their allies, associates and hired guns from around the world converge on the UK to do battle with the guys here? And what would the local guys do about business? They would have to get alternative supply routes and contacts set up in double quick time, which would in all probability mean looking to take existing ones off someone else. And whoever that would be, would be unlikely to want to give them up easily. So you could end up with the UK Brethren fighting a three way war, versus The Mohawks, versus the rest of the Brethren world, and versus other gangs whose livelihoods they wanted to take over. Christ, no wonder it looked like bad news to Bob.
‘Your book,’ he said, much to my surprise changing the subject suddenly, ‘all those guns. The ones Damage said they had dropped in from Eastern Europe. Do you think that was true?’
How the hell should I know, I wondered? I just took down what he was telling me when I interviewed him. You’re the bloody cops, if you want to go digging for guns why doesn’t SOCA find out?
‘It’s just we’ve never seen any sign of The Brethren having access to that sort of automatic weaponry,’ he was saying. ‘Handguns yes, but not AKs and stuff. I was wondering whether it might just have been Damage bigging it up. You know, using you to put a bit of a scare into potential rivals.
Don’t take on The Brethren, they’re seriously tooled up
, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, as far as I know.’
‘Any idea where they would be now?’
Like a lot of other clubs, The Brethren sold support gear to raise money for the club. It was a bit of a cottage industry, with each local charter producing its own designs of T-shirts, badges, stickers and for the girls, knickers, but these would never have the words The Brethren on them or the club logo. That would be too close to allowing the ultimate offence in The Brethren’s world of a non-member wearing an image of the club’s patch, about as guaranteed a way of getting yourself, as Wibble had put, ‘filled in’ as I could think of. Instead The Brethren’s support gear was always based around their nick name of the Menaces and themed in black and red.
‘So, are you going to put it on?’ Bob asked ‘You know what it means don’t you? That you are under his personal protection, that no one else in The Brethren can touch you.’
The Guardian
Tuesday 4 August 2009
Police Fear Patch War
Iain Parke, Crime Correspondent
There is a new patch on the UK outlaw biker scene and its presence means the police fear significant further violence may ensue after last Sunday’s attack on The Brethren MC’s Annual Toy Run, which may even lead to the eruption of a full scale biker war.
The new club’s patch depicts a skull, wearing a headband with a single broken feather, between top and bottom rockers in the old Harley Davidson brand colours of orange and black bearing the name of the club above, The Mohawks MC, and their charter territory below.
And for the first time ever this rocker now gives a mainland Britain location following the ‘patching over’ of two existing independent UK outlaw motorcycle clubs, Capricorn MC based in East Anglia and Dead Men Riding MC based in Yorkshire, to become The Mohawks MC in the UK. As a result, the new club has a territory stretching up the east coast of England from Suffolk to North Yorkshire.
Unusually for one of the international outlaw motorcycle clubs, The Mohawks originated in Canada rather than in the US. Its ‘founding’ or ‘mother’ charter formed in the late sixties in British Columbia where it quickly became heavily involved in commercial marijuana cultivation. Subsequent charters were created in other countries, notably Australia, where the club is believed to have become major producers and distributors of amphetamines.
Despite this spread, The Mohawks remain outside what are known as the Big Six of the internationally organised outlaw motorcycle clubs, but the police fear that they are gunning, sometimes literally, to move up the ladder. And in the UK this would automatically bring them into conflict with one or other of The Rebels MC or The Brethren MC.
This prospect is unlikely to deter The Mohawks’ new member club in the UK as The Mohawks have a reputation for violence. They have fought wars with several of the Big Six clubs in each territory they have entered as they have looked to carve out a niche for themselves, and the new UK charter may feel pressure to move aggressively against one of the other clubs to demonstrate its worthiness to wear The Mohawks colours.
Sources within both the police and outlaw bikers therefore believe this is what lay behind Sunday’s attack during which six people were killed. The president and senior officers of both The Brethren and The Rebels were present at Sunday’s event, and sources at SOCA speculate that it may have been an attempt to decapitate the two clubs.
Given the ferocity of Sunday’s attack and SOCA’s belief that the existing UK outlaw clubs may have substantial stocks of weapons at their disposal, the police are therefore worried about the potential for the situation to deteriorate into further serious violence. They point out that similar biker wars in other countries have led to numerous deaths, both within the biker community and of innocent bystanders caught up in bombings or shootings.
The police are therefore remaining on alert for any signs of further clashes between the clubs and are also continuing to appeal for witnesses to Sunday’s events to come forward.
Thursday 6 August 2009
Wibble had called, inviting me to meet up with him again. But there was to be no cloak and dagger crap this time. I was to come over to their London club house and he’d see me there. The house would be a fortress, I assumed. Wibble and the other Brethren would feel safe from attack by The Mohawks there inside their Wembley castle, while they waited for the Cambridge charter to sort things out to everyone’s satisfaction.
When I got to the end of the little side road a mile or so from the stadium, the atmosphere was very different from the last time I had visited. I found a spot way down the other end of the road, parked my car and made sure it was locked, and then hiked back along the street the way I had come. The kerb outside the clubhouse was deserted between its battered police parking cones which were still out and obviously none of the neighbours had decided to try and move, except for an empty, marked, cop car which was parked smack outside the front door. I assumed the occupants had to be inside as I pressed the intercom buzzer beside the steel shuttered door and felt the CCTV cameras boring into me. Whoever was inside took their sweet time thinking about it.
‘It’s Iain Parke. Here to see Wibble. He asked me to come over,’ I replied to the grille. They didn’t even bother to tell me to wait, they just left me standing there feeling increasingly like a target on a range in front of the silent brick frontage for another few minutes.
‘How’s it going?’ Wibble asked, as Bung showed me into an upstairs room where he was waiting, before commenting, ‘Good, I see you’ve got the patch on OK.’
I had thought it over a lot, but eventually I’d ransacked my kitchen for where I’d stashed away a sewing kit I’d stolen from some hotel and then, sat down with a bottle of beer and a barrow load of curses at the thickness of the leather, I had painstakingly stitched the patch onto the flank of my jacket.
‘Well I’m surprised to be asked over to see you to tell you the truth. Given what’s going on I’d have thought talking to a journalist is the last thing you would want to do right now.’
He seemed to think it was a fair enough point. ‘Well, I need to try to stop this thing getting out of hand. And I still have the project that I wanted you to do.’
He took me up short with his reply.
‘Yeah well, we need to win the peace as well as the war now don’t we?’
Wibble was a media savvy operator. Still it was true he was thinking of PR and perception rather than anything else. His interest was bluntly in Brethren propaganda and not much else so it just seemed another case of what they always said about war and the first casualty.
‘They want you downstairs,’ Bung said to him.
‘OK,’ said Wibble, ‘Tell them I’ll be down in a minute.’
Bung shut the door behind him as he left.