The next night, I was sitting on my bike up the main drag of the Cross, talking to Haystacks from the Jokers and Cub from the Angels, when JR and Chance rocked up and asked me if I wanted to go over to Sweethearts. So I went over to the café with the two triggermen.
Now, the legend of the Widowmaker had continued to grow in the couple of years I’d known who it really was. Some people thought it was JR, but no one guessed it was the sergeant-at-arms for an outlaw bike club. It was rumoured all around the Sydney underworld that JR and the Widowmaker had made trips interstate to take care of crims and some paedophiles. Chance in particular loved those rockspider jobs. A lot of well-known people from a couple of states were taken out due to the talents of JR and the Widowmaker.
I was the only one wearing colours this night, so I knew Chance was working. Chance and JR got their coffees and I ordered a passionfruit shake. We were sitting there yakking when JR said, ‘You notice anything new?’ He opened his fancy brown leather coat far enough for me to see he’d had silver conchos put on his twin holsters.
‘Fuck me. Are you a two-bob lair or what?’
‘If it was anyone else but you, I’d put a bullet in ’em for saying that.’
‘Just as well it is me, then, because if you went for your piece, I’d grab you by the throat and rip it out before you even got the gun out.’
‘I know that. I’m only mucking round.’
Chance jumped in: ‘Yeah, Ceese, don’t be so serious. What’s got your goat?’
‘Oh, I was just talking to Haystacks and Cub about how hard a time our clubs get in the media. We’ve only got to jaywalk and it’s a major criminal offence, but we do work for charities. Just about every club in Australia does charity work. They raise big money with their bike shows and that never gets in the papers or on TV. It’s just pissing me off.’
‘Come on, big feller, calm down,’ Chance said. ‘I want you to do a bit of work for me in a couple of nights time.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to come on a trip with me. It ain’t charity, but we’ll be doing the world a favour.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘There’ll be one less big-noting crim who’s also a big give-up. He’s gone and given up the wrong person this time and our friend wants him taken care of.’
See, Chance wasn’t one of these blokes who just went out and shot people indiscriminately. He made sure he got his target, but if they had bodyguards he wanted them taken care of without killing them. That’s where I came in. The minders were just doing a job. A lot of them weren’t bad blokes. That was the funny thing – as I did a few jobs for Chance over the years, I found out that I was sometimes knocking out blokes I knew and was on good terms with. So I was glad Chance had his code.
A few days later, we got into a rental car and drove a long way out into the sticks. I won’t say where. It was a country estate. Chance had been there before to check it out. He’d sat up on a hill with his big binoculars and watched the place for hours, observing the six bodyguards and security guards and how they moved around the place. He’d heard that some of them were ex-military blokes who were pretty crash hot, so that’s why he wanted me along.
‘They’ll be nothing for you,’ he said. ‘You’ll murder ’em.’
‘I’m not going to murder them,’ I said. ‘I’ll take ’em out for you.’
‘Yeah, Ceese. It was just an expression.’
Around dusk, he parked the car on a quiet bush track and we got out. There was nothing but trees in every direction.
‘Come on, we’re walking from here. It’s about two miles.’ He led the way west, bush-bashing through the scrub. Eventually we came to a clearing and hopped a Cyclone fence. Unusually for me, I was wearing joggers – black – because Chance had warned me we’d have to jump this fence.
I was wearing black jeans, a black shirt. My hair was tied back and, as always, I had a black bandana covering my forehead. Chance was done up like a friggin’ ninja, all in black with a black balaclava. We sat and watched the house and the guards walking around for an hour or two before I moved in.
With the kyite – the Korean martial art which I practised – I’d been taught how to move around quietly. I’d noticed how the guards had a pattern to their rounds, coming out to a point about 30 metres from their post, so I got myself into a dark pocket on that route, stuck my head down and waited. Speed was crucial. I got the first guy with my hand over his mouth and a hard punch to the liver, which stunned him. He moaned as I got my hand over the top of his head and bent his neck back. I stuck my thumb up under his hyoid bone and he was out cold. That was one of my sleeper holds. I kept the pressure on the hyoid for 25 seconds, knowing that would keep him out for ten to 15 minutes. I tied his hands and his feet with black cable ties, then pulled out one of the gags Chance had given me – a ball stuck onto the middle of a strap. I jammed the ball into his mouth and tied the strap tight around the back of his head.
I ran crouching to the next post. I grabbed the guard and this time I just pulled him down and got my knees in his back, choking him into unconsciousness. I moved through, closer to the target, knowing that the nearer I got, the more highly trained the guards were likely to be. And more highly armed. But they just weren’t expecting an attack like this, so they weren’t on their toes. I knocked the six bodyguards out without any of them so much as getting their hands on their guns. I flashed a little green light to Chance. He flashed a red one back. That was my cue to get out.
Chance came in and did whatever it was that he was there to do and I waited for him at the Cyclone fence.
He returned in three minutes flat. Job done. The whole thing was over in about twelve minutes. Now, remember, this book is three per cent fiction and 97 per cent fact.
The target in this case was a crim. They’re like outlaw bikers. They won’t talk to the cops. His people weren’t going to give anyone up. They’d either just let it go or try to even up themselves, but when two blokes come in balaclavaed up it’s pretty hard to know who to get even with. So Chance and I never heard anything more about this one. We were sweet.
We got back to town in the early hours of the morning and Chance paid me off with a tidy sum. ‘You’d be making some big money up here, wouldn’t ya?’ he said. ‘I’m paying you a good wage and I know you’re getting a fair whack when you bodyguard these couriers.’
‘I hope you don’t think I’m bodyguarding drug couriers,’ I said. ‘There are a lot of diamonds and important documents that get moved from state to state or suburb to suburb.’
‘Nah, I know you don’t have nothing to do with drugs,’ he said. ‘You seem to be the flavour of the month to be the bodyguard or the courier.’
‘Yeah, that probably comes from people who saw me doing the round-ring fighting. They’ve seen me beating the best blokes in the world, so they figure their stuff’s going to be safe with me. Not that I’m patting meself on the back. It’s a fact.’
‘Yeah, I know Mr Sin is quite happy with your work.’
‘Well, that’s good to know.’
*
LIKE I’VE said before, JR was a spiffy sort of bloke. A lot of the time he wore a fedora. When he wore his brown leather coat, he’d often match it with brown leather pants, pointy brown shoes. One night, I was sitting in the Manzil Room with him and Chance. Lenny McPherson was there with his crew, George Freeman was there with his and even Joe Meissner had popped in for an hour or so. It was a Who’s Who of the Cross. It was interesting to watch them. Freeman’s blokes were like their boss – more expensively dressed than Lenny’s blokes, who were more knockabout.
Meissner didn’t have a crew. He was a hard man in his own right, a former world karate champion, and didn’t need anyone to take care of him. (A few years later, in 1982, Dolph Lundgren got a job working for Meissner as a bouncer. He was a big unit who was the current European champion in Kyokushin karate. He and I had a go one day. Since he’s now a movie star, I won’t dint his image by going into detail other than to remind you I’ve never been beaten.) Meissner ran a strip club and a couple of other clubs. He wasn’t into drugs or anything else like that. Nothing really illegal. He was just Joe Meissner and you didn’t mess with him. People respected him.
Anyway, JR got up and swaggered straight at all these blokes to get to the bar. As they saw him coming, they just parted like the Red Sea for Moses. So our leather-panted Moses came back with a round of drinks and hadn’t he enjoyed that show.
‘Wouldn’t you like people to step aside for you the way they do for me?’ he said to Chance. ‘All you gotta do is let people know you’re the Widowmaker and they’ll be falling over ’emselves to get out of your way.’
‘Mate, I like it just the way it is,’ Chance said. ‘If it was any other way, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.’
I butted in: ‘But he doesn’t have to go around telling everyone he’s a hitman to have people step out of his way, JR.’
‘Yeah, I know they step out of the way of you and your brothers, too. I just reckon they’d do it a lot faster,’ JR said. ‘Sometimes I get sick of hearing about this Wrecking Crew of yours.’
‘Hey, it wasn’t us that called ourselves the Wrecking Crew,’ I said. ‘That was Jimmy Anderson. And I can’t help it if people step out of the way when me and me brothers walk down the street.’
We were yakking on about this when my brothers walked in. But they didn’t come towards us. They were at full steam, heading towards a far corner of the place, all chests out and steam coming out their ears. They didn’t even stop to say hello to me. Something was going on. I got up and saw that there were some Jackals over in the far corner. I hadn’t even noticed they were in the joint. A pillar had blocked my view.
I got up, turning to Chance and JR. ‘You fellers stay out of it.’
My brothers were swinging before they even reached the Jackals. Snake leapt over a table to land right in the middle of them. It was a mess. I ran over and clocked a couple, but pretty soon I realised that this wasn’t the time or the place to be squaring up. With all the top blokes from the Cross here, there was too much opportunity for things to spill over and for us to find ourselves bluing with all these blokes we had no quarrel with. I didn’t want my brothers belting any of Lenny’s blokes or George’s blokes. We would have smashed them, too, but we didn’t want those guys for enemies. My brothers didn’t give a fuck about who was who, though. If they wanted to get someone, they got ’em and on that night it was the Jackals’ turn.
I had to drag them away. ‘C’mon, we’ll wait for ’em outside.’
So we left. And as we stood a little bit down the road, my brothers explained that a few days earlier, a bunch of Jackals had tried thumping Wack in the Carousel Club. Wack decked about four of them, but copped a pretty good gash across his left eye with a buck knife.
We waited and waited for the Jackals to come out. It ended up that the bouncers threw them out and as soon as they hit the footpath it was back on. Again, it was down into the little lane on the side where I’d beaten up Icepick. They got stomped to the shithouse.
The Cross might have been neutral territory, but the Jackals had broken the rule by going Wack, so we were only getting payback. As far as the other clubs were concerned, we were in the right.
JR rang me at home that Sunday and told me that Big Lenny and George were going on about it. ‘Lenny said: “Those Campbells are friggin’ maniacs.” They were both wishing they had youse working for them.’
‘Well, that’s not going to happen,’ I said. ‘Well, not as a family anyway.’
About five days later, I got a call. It wasn’t hard for anyone to get my number. Just about everyone up the Cross had it. Not that I handed it out, except to some strippers and a few of the other girls. But they apparently handed it out left, right and centre. I picked up the phone and it was the Jackals’ president, Grizzly (just about every club had someone called Grizzly or Bear). He wanted to have a chat about what had happened. He asked if I’d meet him at their clubhouse in Gladesville. I got into my gear, put on my cut and rode straight over. As I pulled up, this big bloke came out of the clubhouse. He hadn’t been there on the night of the blue and I didn’t recognise him. He turned out to be their sergeant-at-arms, a guy called Monster, who my brothers had told me was the one who’d started it all. ‘You Caesar?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘The prez will see you inside.’
‘No, if your president wants to speak to me, he can come out here,’ I said. I wasn’t walking into the clubhouse without knowing who or what was in there. I wasn’t that stupid. So Grizzly came out and he wanted to know what it was all about.
‘Apparently, the night before the blue your sergeant-at-arms here kicked over me brother’s bike to impress some sheilas up the Cross,’ I said. ‘Then he took off with a few of your other members, so me brothers went looking for him.’
Monster was standing there listening to all this. He stepped towards me and growled: ‘Well, you tell your brother any time he wants to, I’m ready.’
‘Really?’ I said, stepping towards him. As far as I was concerned, if you wanted to fight my brother, you wanted to fight me.
As quick as I could, I lifted my boot and side-kicked him in just the right spot on the knee. As he was going down, I hit him with an elbow and broke his jaw.
I’m protective of my brothers, but we’re all protective of each other. It would have been the same if he’d told Snake or Bull or Wack that he wanted to fight me. So now I had the rest of the Jackals standing outside the clubhouse looking at their president to see what the next move was going to be.
‘You can consider this thing over,’ I said, staring them down. ‘Otherwise, you can step out here onto the footpath. I’ll take all your colours.’ I stared at them some more, daring them to come down. They stared back. And I did something I don’t normally do. I took my shirt off. At that time I was built like I was working out with professional bodybuilders . . . because I was. I was training with the Australian heavyweight champion. I had a bigger chest than him. He had 20-inch arms and mine were 21.5 inches.
I’m not sure why I took off my shirt, but when I did, there was a ‘Whoa’ kind of thing came back at me from them. I think it’s why blokes, especially these days, build themselves up and wanna look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. They think their bodies impress people and scare them. Probably they do, but as a fighter I knew the best bluers weren’t the muscle men, they were the ones with rock-hard bodies like boxers. I’d never think much about taking on some big meathead who struggles to fit through a door. It’s probably true that the bigger, musclier blokes are harder to hurt, but there are still places you can hit them – under the side of the ribs, or in the throat, or the medulla in the back of the neck. You can cripple them there.
Anyway, the Jackals weren’t game to come down and test out whether I was all show and no go. I gathered up my gear and rode off.