If
Good Housekeeping magazine ever
gives an award for the nation's
tidiest Den Of Iniquity, the western
Sydney clubhouse of the Finks outlaw
motorcycle club will be odds-on to
win ... writes Richard Guilliatt
from The Australian
One recent Friday evening, as 20-odd
Finks gathered inside this fortified
warehouse for their weekly social
meeting, nominee members
fastidiously vacuumed the blue
carpet and mopped the chequerboard
tiles around the bar under the
watchful gaze of the goateed,
tattooed hulk who is their
sergeant-at-arms, Ferret. The place
appeared spotless, but when Ferret
spotted a couple of fellow-Finks
smoking down the back of the gym
among the weight machines, his eyes
narrowed.
“Don’t you blokes drop any butts
down there,” he called out, his jaw
clenching in a manner that caused
the “Finks M.C.” tattoo emblazoned
on the side of his neck to pulsate
forebodingly.
It’s a tough gig, being the
disciplinarian in a bikie club. But
Ferret, who has been a
sergeant-at-arms with the Finks for
19 years, brings the requisite
physical presence to the job: his
shaven head is shaped like a missile
warhead, his neck is almost the
width of a tree-trunk and his
massive chest and 19-inch biceps are
pumped from years of weight-lifting.
The tatts covering him from ankle to
ear are a multi-coloured riot of
flames, demons, skulls, crashing
waves and Finks logos.
Exactly what punishments Ferret has
meted out in his years on the job is
a subject he’s reluctant to get
into. “You have to do what you have
to do,” he says phlegmatically.
Suffice to say that being a Finks
sergeant-at-arms is not a low-risk
occupation. One of his predecessors,
Allan Bradford, was shot dead in
1980 while sitting astride his
Harley on a suburban Sydney street,
a suspected retribution for
Bradford’s role in the killing of a
Hells Angel eight years earlier. The
current sergeant-at-arms of the
club’s Gold Coast chapter, Greg
“TwentyFive” Keating, was recently
jailed for four months after
refusing to give evidence to the
Australian Crime Commission.
A year ago, however, Ferret took on
a job even tougher than keeping his
fellow Finks in line: trying to win
over middle-Australia to the idea
that bikies are a persecuted
minority. With assistance from a
professional public relations
agency, Ferret has taken to the
radio airwaves, the National Press
Club, even the hallowed halls of
Sydney Law School, to argue that
“anti-bikie laws” introduced in
South Australia, New South Wales and
Queensland represent a grave and
dangerous attack on the public’s
civil rights.
On face value a man with three
convictions for violence and the
word “Unforgiving” tattooed around
his throat might seem an odd
salesman for this cause. But Ferret
is also a father of two, grandfather
of five, a teetotaller, health
columnist for Live To Ride magazine
and a small businessman (proprietor
of Blacktown Tattoos for the past 10
years). His MySpace profile suggests
he is also tertiary-educated,
although he doesn’t appear keen to
promote this. “It doesn’t matter
about that stuff,” he demurs. “Just
go on the angle that I’m extremely
smart.”
Before a lunchtime crowd at the
National Press Club in Canberra last
August, dressed in his full regalia
of black Finks T-shirt and patched
leather vest, he got off to a
slightly nervous start but was soon
scoring laughs at the expense of
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. By the end
of the lunch he was posing for
photographs with his arms around a
group of private school students.
As part of the PR drive, the Finks
have opened their Blacktown
clubhouse to the media, which is why
I’m here with Ferret being
introduced as “Louis, from The
Australian newspaper.” This is not
an error – in Ferret’s opinion I am
a ringer for the gormless British
television journalist Louis Theroux,
and a “bodgie” name is mandatory in
bikiedom. “You’ve gotta have a
bodgie, Louis,” he advises. “It
makes it harder for people to find
you.” Street-philosophy is one of
Ferret’s specialties, his other
maxims including “Anything’s fixable
with stitches”, “The weak shall
perish” and “Only the shiny part
hurts”.
The Finks’ Blacktown clubhouse is
painted almost entirely black
inside, and features a pool table,
sound system, a small stage
(primarily used by strippers), video
games, wall-mounted flatscreen TV,
pinball machine, gym and a private
upstairs lounge area accessible only
to members. Four wall-mounted
closed-circuit television screens
offer multiple views of the
surrounding industrial streets, and
anyone entering the club passes
through a security area enclosed in
high-tensile steel mesh which, I’m
assured, no bullet can pass through.
High on the wall, next to a
roll-call of deceased Finks, is a
sign in gothic lettering which
reads:
VIOLENCE
MOTORCYCLES
GANGBANGS
“We’re group-sex friendly,” explains
Ferret. “If girls come along we will
gangbang them and look after them.
Not like some of these footballers
who fuck girls and treat them like
dirt.”
It would be redundant to point out
that this is not a lifestyle for
everyone. Like all outlaw bikie
clubs, the Finks live in a world of
maximum machismo and tribal loyalty.
But if there is major criminality
going on here, the police have
apparently failed to uncover it,
despite a raid last year by the
massed forces of the NSW Gangs
Squad, Blacktown police, the local
council, the Fire Department and the
water and electricity utilities.
According to Ferret, the only
outcome of that raid was a citation
from the council for a staircase
that wasn’t built to code.
The raid was one of countless
actions NSW police have launched
since a horrendous brawl between the
Hells Angels and Comancheros at
Sydney airport in March last year
left one man dead, sparking fears of
an all-out bikie war. The airport
incident, for which 13 people are
facing different charges that are
now being defended, marked an ugly
turn in the inter-bikie violence
which had sparked a succession of
shootings and clubhouse bombings
across the nation over the previous
five years. It was also a watershed
for the NSW Government, which rammed
its “anti-biker” legislation through
Parliament less than two weeks
later, modelling it on South
Australian laws passed the previous
year. Queensland’s Labor government
followed suit in August, and Western
Australia is drafting its own
copycat legislation.
With minor variations, the laws all
share the same basic thrust,
treating domestic crime like
terrorism. Police can apply to have
an outlaw club “declared”, based on
secret intelligence which the club
itself has no right to see, after
which anyone who is a member can be
subject to control-orders which ban
them from meeting each other and, in
some states, from holding specified
jobs.
The haste with which the NSW laws
were written was evident from the
speech by then-Premier Nathan Rees
introducing them, which assured
Parliament that legal safeguards
would ensure the legislation is
“specific to outlaw motorcycle
gangs”. In fact, there are no such
safeguards and police can target any
organisation they deem to be a
criminal enterprise. Civil
libertarians and criminologists are
appalled, and the outgoing NSW chief
prosecutor, Nicholas Cowdery, warned
he saw auguries of a “police state”.
But the public cheered on as the
laws were passed with barely an
opposing vote. The state’s
Opposition leader, Barry O’Farrell,
told Parliament he’d be happy if all
outlaw bikies were locked in two
rooms and left to “shoot themselves
to death”.
The predicted all-out bikie war,
however, never came to pass.
Instead, hostilities appeared to ebb
as rival clubs banded together to
sort out their differences, court
the media and raise money for a
legal challenge to the laws. Last
year two members of the Finks
successfully overturned the South
Australian laws in that state’s
Supreme Court; the SA Government is
now asking the High Court to
reinstate the laws. The bikies have
suddenly become a legal cause
célèbre whose arguments are
supported by prosecutors and even
former police.
“We could read right through it,”
says Ferret. “They say it’s an
anti-bikie law but it applies to
anyone. They brought in the
legislation thinking they would
disband the clubs but all it did was
bring us together.”
A field day for the tabloids
When he’s not using his bodgie,
Ferret is known to his mum as Mark
Moroney. We know this because WA’s
police commissioner, Karl
O’Callaghan, telephoned the Perth
radio station 6PR last October, at
the tail-end of an on-air debate
between Ferret and WA
attorney-general Christian Porter,
to publicly assert that Ferret had a
“long history of violence” which
included 40 convictions for assault.
Unfortunately, O’Callaghan got it
wrong. Ferret acknowledges three
convictions for violence, for which
he spent 28 months behind bars, and
admits he once pleaded guilty to
assaulting a woman. But the latter
offence, he says, occurred when he
pushed the woman away during a pub
brawl 23 years ago, for which he
received a good behaviour bond. One
of his convictions goes back to
1981, when he was an 18-year-old
misfit running around Dee Why, on
Sydney’s northern beaches.
“I went to jail as a kid for
violence,” he says. “But that was
before I was ever in the Finks.”
The episode highlights one of the
bikies’ central complaints: that
police routinely sensationalise the
nature and magnitude of bikie crime.
Since the airport bashing the
tabloids have had a field day with
scare-stories that suggested, among
other things, that bikies were
planning to randomly assassinate a
South Australian cop, and that the
Hells Angels had been ordered to
kill all Comancheros on sight. In
fact, the Comancheros and the Angels
are among more than two dozen clubs
which now meet weekly under the
banner of the United Motorcycle
Council (UMC), an umbrella
organisation of bikie clubs that has
formed in NSW and three other states
as a lobby group and central
council.
It’s through the UMC – which
includes the Vietnam Veterans and
Christian clubs such as the
Brotherhood and God’s Squad – that
the bikies have mounted their PR
blitz, hiring the public relations
firm Cole Lawson Communications as
media adviser. And it was during an
early council meeting that Ferret
won the job of chairman and
spokesperson of the NSW chapter, in
part because his wisecracks broke
the stony silence that descended on
the room when bikies found
themselves staring across a table at
rival clubs they’d historically been
at war with.
“We realised we had to get out there
amongst it,” he says. “A lot of the
stuff they write in the papers is
hearsay; it’s a continual soap
opera. We’ve been laughing at the
stories for 40 years.”
There’s something undeniably jarring
about a bunch of self-styled outlaws
hiring a PR company to stop the
government from outlawing them. But
the Finks may be the first
organisation in Australia banned by
government decree since the Menzies
government tried to snuff out the
Communist Party in 1950. On May 14
last year the South Australian
attorney-general, Michael Atkinson,
“declared” the Finks to be an
organised crime operation under the
state’s anti-bikie legislation.
Atkinson said the Finks had
committed numerous acts of violence
against the public, and 13 of its 46
members in SA had been jailed since
joining. Two Finks, Donald Hudson
and Sandro Totani, were promptly
slapped with control-orders
prohibiting them from associating
with anyone else in the club.
That the Finks have a long history
of violence is not exactly in
dispute. A sickening brawl between
Finks and Hells Angels during a
kickboxing tournament at a Gold
Coast resort in 2006 left three men
shot, two others stabbed and the
resort ballroom extensively trashed.
In 1997 a dozen Queensland Finks
were charged over the bashing death
of a man who had stolen one of their
bikes; two of them were jailed on
murder and manslaughter charges.
“The Finks is a very violent
motorcycle club,” says Ferret
unhesitatingly. “If people want to
f..k with us, we’ll f..k with them.
We go into bars and there’s always
some idiot who wants to say they
took on a bikie. It’s like Jeff
Harding, the boxer, he’s always
getting punched in bars because some
drunk is trying to impress his mates
by picking a fight with him.”
It’s a plaint bikies have been
voicing since the clubs first roared
out of post-war America more than
half a century ago. There may be
truth to it, but like nearly all
bikies, Ferret is loathe to admit
that the blood-brother ethos of the
clubs is itself a root-cause of much
violence. “We don’t endorse
violence,” he insists, “we’re just
saying that if people want to f..k
with us, we will deal with them.
We’re not riding around the streets
pulling people off the road and
beating them up.”
As evidence that the Finks are an
organised crime group, the South
Australian Government released a
report alleging that the club’s
members in that state have amassed
162 convictions for violence since
1967 and 173 drug convictions since
1970. But nearly three-quarters of
the violence convictions and more
than half the drug convictions
occurred before the individuals in
question joined the club. Broken
down, the statistics show that over
roughly four decades, the Finks
racked up just over one violent
offence per year.
Police argue that the conviction
rate is just the visible tip of a
proverbial iceberg, given how
reluctant people are to give
evidence against an outlaw
motorcycle club. But whether bikies
truly constitute a threat to society
akin to the mafia is a question that
divides even law enforcement bodies.
Victorian police have declined to
pursue the new bikie laws, and Kevin
Kitson, the acting chief executive
of the Australian Crime Commission,
downplayed the significance of bikie
gangs when he gave evidence to
Parliament in November 2008.
Clive Small, former assistant
commissioner of police in New South
Wales, says some have morphed into
organised crime gangs over the past
10 years as clubs proliferated and
restrictions on membership loosened.
In his new book Blood Money
(co-written with Tom Gilling) Small
catalogues the extensive busting of
amphetamine laboratories linked to
various bikie gangs since the late
1990s, most notably a raid on the
Newcastle and Gold Coast chapters of
the Nomads which netted 74 firearms
and $55 million worth of speed in
2001.
In Blood Money Small asserts that
another bikie club, the Rebels, now
include “Italian crime figures” in
some chapters, and points out that a
dozen Rebels led the funeral
procession of the underworld figure
and convicted drug importer Graham
“Croc” Palmer in Sydney nine years
ago. Police in South Australia have
already identified the Rebels as the
next club they want declared under
the anti-bikie laws, should the
state government win in the High
Court.
So the clubhouse of the Rebels’
Camden chapter, in southwestern
Sydney, comes as a bit of a
surprise. Located behind a steel
roller door in a strip of warehouses
on a main highway, it’s not much
bigger than a four-car garage and
has the makeshift ambience of a
rumpus room. The floor is concrete
and painted dark blue, the walls are
festooned with Rebels posters,
there’s a pool table under fluoros,
a bar with a dozen burly blokes
gathered around it, a small stage
with the obligatory chrome
stripper’s pole, some white plastic
chairs and tables crafted from
sheet-metal. Erald Hassan, a veteran
Rebel who invited me here during a
UMC meeting, says that since pubs
across NSW now routinely ban any
bikie wearing colours, the Thursday
night gathering has become the
Camden Rebels’ primary opportunity
for socialising.
“Wives go shopping on Thursday
night,” explains Hassan over a Coke.
“We come here and talk shit. That’s
how it works, isn’t it?”
A swarthy and garrulous 42-year-old
with a heavy smoking habit, Hassan
was 21 when he swapped his red V8
Brock Commodore for a secondhand
Harley-Davidson Shovelhead. The son
of Turkish Cypriot immigrants, he
joined a wave of new-generation “wog
boys” drawn to the thunder of 1200cc
bikes and the Confederate flag patch
of the Rebels, whose national
president, Alex Vella, is a
Maltese-born immigrant from nearby
Horsley Park.
“If you live in Cronulla, you play
with the Cronulla Sharks, you know
what I’m saying? The Rebels were
near us in the Macarthur, Liverpool,
Campbelltown area. As a 21-year-old
I could have been a junkie, a pot
smoker or a car-thief. But I chose
to work and buy a bike and hang out
with the Rebels.”
The Rebels have had their own image
problems over the past couple of
decades. Vella was convicted of
possession of a trafficable quantity
of marijuana in 1995 and
subsequently forced to pay $650,000
to the New South Wales Crime
Commission to settle a
proceeds-of-crime action; four
Rebels were shot dead in Queensland
and South Australia in 1998, and in
2003 a Sydney Rebel, Constantinos
Georgiou, was convicted of murdering
three Bandidos in the basement of a
Sydney nightclub.
“It could be occasionally that there
are bad eggs,” concedes Hassan, “but
there are bad eggs in every group.
The Rebels name can’t be held
responsible for every man’s actions…
If one person from a club gets
charged with possessing cannabis,
another gets charged with assault
and another gets charged for failing
to pay his taxes, that’s not a
criminal organisation. In fact,
you’d have to say it’s very
disorganised.”
Now married with three kids, Hassan
is a motor mechanic by trade but
ditched that job several years ago
to open a pawnbroking business. As
it turns out, he’ll be banned from
both jobs if subject to a control
order under the NSW anti-bikie-laws
– motor mechanic and “commercial
agent” being among the 12 proscribed
professions. Hassan closed down his
hock-shop a few months after the
legislation came into effect. These
days he runs a pizzeria.
“Put it this way, if we get declared
I’m going on the pension,” he says.
“I can’t be a motor mechanic, I
can’t run a hock shop and I haven’t
got the money to fight it, so
hypothetically, it sticks. What do I
do? Maybe the Government can give me
the answer. I haven’t got a criminal
record. I’ve stayed within the law
for the 21 years I’ve been in the
club – that’s not bad. When did the
government decide to stop us from
working?”
Of course, Hassan has the option of
quitting the Rebels, but that would
be an unthinkable breach of club
loyalty. When his infant son was
rendered quadriplegic by a car
accident five years ago, the Rebels
helped raised $100,000 to fly the
boy to Holland for experimental
stem-cell treatment.
“You can take all these guys and
outlaw them.” he says, sweeping an
arm around the clubroom, “and we’re
still going to be mates. You’re
talking about people who’ve known
each other for 20 or 30 years. How
can you stop being friends?”
The price of loyalty
Sitting in the back room of
Blacktown Tattoos one weekday
afternoon, Ferret points to a
cupboard door covered in
news-clippings, a gallery of Finks
fallen foul of the law. “He’s in
jail,” he says, pointing to a photo
of a wickedly grinning bikie. “…He’s
in jail… he’s going to jail… he’s
just got out of jail…” The latter
comment refers to Greg “Twenty Five”
Keating, the massive
sergeant-at-arms of the club’s Gold
Coast chapter, who married his
sweetheart in full Finks colours at
the Surfers Paradise Marriott Resort
last August, then went to prison two
weeks later for refusing to talk to
the Australian Crime Commission.
“He’s hung around us since he was 15
years old – he understands loyalty,”
notes Ferret. “Why would you go and
rat people out to the pigs when the
pigs are our enemy?”
The police campaign against bikies
has indeed been relentless since the
Sydney airport incident, a
combination of elaborate
military-style clubhouse raids and
daily stop-and-search harassment.
Various victories have been claimed
along the way: on the Gold Coast,
Superintendent Jim Keogh recently
boasted that bikies are now “lying
low” in his region, while the NSW
Government has applauded the
“on-the-ground and in-your-face
policing” of Strike Force Raptor,
announcing it has resulted in more
than 1500 charges against 724 outlaw
bikies and the seizure of 174 guns
and more than $1 million in cash.
Again, however, that wasn’t quite
accurate. Detective Superintendent
Mal Lanyon, head of the NSW Gangs
Squad, acknowledges that only some
of the 724 arrested were outlaw
bikies – how many is unclear, as
police failed to supply detailed
figures despite repeated requests.
As evidence of organised crime by
bikies, Lanyon points to the recent
conviction of four Bandido
associates for a drive-by shooting.
Bikie gangs, he asserts, are
structured like paramilitary
organisations, actively recruiting
people for their particular criminal
skills and engaging in extortion and
major drug manufacturing.
“One has to ask: if they aren’t
criminal organisations, why is there
a need for violence between them?
What are they protecting?” he asks.
On July 6 NSW police ratcheted up
their campaign against bikies when
they finally used their new powers,
applying to have the Hells Angels
declared a criminal organisation in
NSW. In support of the application,
police lodged 30 dossiers of
documents with the Supreme Court.
Asked how much of that documentation
was “protected criminal
intelligence” which the Hells Angels
would be prevented from seeing,
Lanyon said he was not at liberty to
comment.
Even Lanyon’s former colleague,
Clive Small, however, expresses
doubts about the way the war on
bikies is being waged. “That
stuff-up at the airport was nasty,”
says Small, “but it was really a
group of drunks running into people
they didn’t like and having a blue.
It was no big organised gang fight.”
The reality of the bikies is that
some club chapters are criminal
organisations and some aren’t, says
Small. What police need is the
resources to jail the offenders
using existing conspiracy and drug
laws, instead of governments rushing
through unnecessary new laws and
issuing “bullshit” arrest statistics
so that they can trumpet a crackdown
on bikies before heading off to
lunch.
The PR war, meanwhile, goes on. In
June the United Motorycycle Council
organised a procession of 30 outlaws
in full colours to ride on NSW
Parliament House, seeking an
audience with the state
attorney-general, John Hatzistergos.
Ferret led the ride on his Harley,
bearing a letter – he had even
signed it with his birth name –
requesting a full public debate of
the anti-bikie laws. Accompanied by
Brendan “Brendo” George of the Lone
Wolf club and Greg Hirst from the
Brotherhood, Ferret was ushered into
the reception area, where he took
seat on a burgundy leather sofa
while a superannuation debate droned
over the in-house TV screens.
Out on the street, Hells Angels,
Nomads, Comancheros and Bandidos
chatted to the public while Strike
Force Raptor videotaped the massed
Harleys and booked them all for
illegal parking. After 10 minutes,
word came down that Hatzistergos was
refusing to meet the bikies, so
Ferret handed his letter to an
independent MP, Greg Piper, and
asked him to pass it on before
leaving. Unfortunately the assembled
media missed the most memorable
moment of the day: on his way out of
Parliament House, “Brendo” of the
Lone Wolf club – resplendent in full
colours, and with the outlaw bikie’s
“1%” insignia tattooed on his neck –
stopped to share a few warm words
with a grey-suited gent who’d just
emerged from the Legislative
Assembly. It was his dad, Thomas
George, National Party MP for
Lismore.
Two weeks later, Ferret led the
Finks up to Queensland, where they
rode into Surfers Paradise with the
Black Uhlans, Nomads and Warriors –
an 80-strong contingent there to
commemorate the 40th anniversary of
the Gold Coast Finks and stage a
noisy riposte to police claims that
bikies on the Golden Mile are
“laying low”. It all went without a
hitch, but Ferret was affronted by a
story in the Gold Coast Bulletin
which claimed his platoon of Harleys
had roared through northern NSW at
150kmh and run every red light on
the Gold Coast Highway.
That was total rubbish, says Ferret
– the cops followed them the whole
way. “We stayed just below the speed
limit,” he insists. “We were getting
around in second gear sometimes.”
Being born to be wild is getting
harder every day. |