NRL bad boy Anthony Watts has abandoned his league ambitions to join the Finks bikie gang
- The Sunday Mail (Qld)
- June 15, 2013
NRL bad boy Anthony Watts at the gym in preparation for the upcoming League season with the Tugun Seahawks on the Gold Coast. PIC: Glenn Hampson Source: The Sunday Mail (Qld)
BEFORE his father died suddenly last
year, rugby league bad boy Anthony Watts promised his biggest
supporter he would try to make it back into the NRL.
But the troubled Watts has now abandoned all hopes of salvaging his career and instead joined a different "club": the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang.
The former North Queensland Cowboy and Sydney Rooster spoke exclusively to The Sunday Mail this week after his latest run-ins with the law, including his arrest over a Coolangatta bikie brawl and a court appearance for possessing knuckledusters.
He said being in the Finks was "like being in a footy team" and gang members were now his "brothers".
"I've given up on trying to make it back (to the NRL) now," Watts said.
"With all the stuff that's happened, no NRL club is going to touch me now.
"I'm loyal to my mates and they (the Finks) are my mates. It's just like a brotherhood."
Watts is not the first top-grade footballer to get down and dirty with bikies and criminals.
But he has taken that association one step further by actually joining a gang. And not just any gang.
The Finks are regarded as Queensland's most notorious bikie group, the first targeted by police under the 2009 Criminal Organisation Act.
An application to have the gang's Gold Coast chapter declared a criminal organisation is expected to be heard in the Supreme Court later this year after a failed High Court challenge by the Finks.
Police allege the Finks had been involved in murder, extortion, robbery and drug trafficking and pose "a great risk to the community".
Affidavits lodged with the Supreme Court last year alleged 45 Finks members had criminal convictions.
Experts say bikie gangs and football clubs have much in common: a hierarchal structure, club "colours" and macho camaraderie.
Bond University criminologist and former detective Dr Terry Goldsworthy says the gangs had a tribal culture.
"Football teams have their coach and captain, bikie gangs their president and sergeant-at-arms. There's a clear structure of command and control," he said.
Sacked by the Roosters in 2011, Watts joined the Tugun Seahawks in the local league to try to resurrect his career.
In February, Watts told The Sunday Mail how he was arrested so drunk that he was clinically dead in hospital last year on a day he was supposed to meet coaching legend Wayne Bennett about a potential career lifeline.
Now a Finks nominee, he insists: "I don't regret anything."
