Below the quiet surface, a bikie war simmers

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Below the quiet surface, a bikie war simmers
BY: Paul Kent
Source: dailytelegraph.com.au
Australia - THEY came together like threads in a hangman's rope. Small whispers.
The Nomads were over him, went one. He wasn't doing this, they said. They don't like that. He was letting down the club. They were no longer prepared to work under him any more . . .
The resentment continued until, finally, the threads came together, the order was given . . . he was going to get knocked.
The order was significant, as he was no average bikie.
He was Scott Orrock, national president of The Nomads. And the order came from inside. There had not been a move by a club against its national president this dramatic since Mick Hawi told Jock Ross his time as president of the Comanchero was over and, when Ross resisted, Hawi told him it was going to happen and they could formalise it in one of two ways.
Ross, who completely understood what was not said, walked away.
So, like Ross did, Orrock walked away from the Nomads last December and met with Hells Angels leaders shortly after at a steakhouse in Strathfield.
There, their business done, he and four other Nomads loyal to Orrock "patched over". Swapped their Nomad patches for the death's head of the Angels.
The following day, December 3, 2009, Orrock's car was fire-bombed. A day after that his tattoo shop was broken into and trashed. Orrock went into hiding and he has not come up since.
The unnatural quiet that has descended on Sydney this past six months has many of us believing that the bikie war, which flared so violently for three months beginning last February, has ended. But it is a false quiet.
Strike Force Raptor created considerable noise since its formation last March, five days after the alleged murder of Anthony Zervas at Sydney Airport.
Through to February, there has been 596 arrests, with 1459 charges laid. They range from possessing prohibited firearms to assault occasioning actual bodily harm, affray, supply prohibited drug, possess prohibited drug, deal in proceeds of crime, aggravated robbery, robbery in company and demand money with menaces.
Yet while there has been significant arrests and an apparent quietness, the gangs remain highly active and potentially more dangerous than ever.
Their lack of public activity can be put down more to shrewd politics than the impact of Strike Force Raptor.
When the NSW Government announced plans for new legislation banning outlaw motorcycle gangs last April, the bikies went quickly into action.
A meeting at Alex Vella's Rebels clubhouse saw the formation of harmlessly sounding United Motorcycle Council of NSW, which plans to fight the recently introduced legislation.
In the meantime, club presidents told their members to cool it.
The feuds did not end as many believe, they were merely put on hold. The evidence is in the dozens of young men currently being recruited.
Notorious, essentially based around Kings Cross, is recruiting along a belt that stretches from the inner city through to Auburn and Parramatta, ending at Liverpool, which is Rebels territory.
The Hells Angels - whose chapters answer to the US founders, so have more strict recruitment policies - have recruited less aggressively but more deliberately.
The Comanchero are recruiting south of the city, through Rockdale and Hurstville and surrounding suburbs. Last year the Comanchero, in a superb stroke of public relations, held a boat cruise on Sydney Harbour. Media was invited and there the bikies were revealed as ordinary men with nothing more than a common interest in motorbikes. Unrevealed was that each Comanchero paid $1000 to attend.
Much of that money is now funding the defence for Hawi and four others against murder charges laid after Zervas's death.
Elsewhere, spots of bikie violence are still breaking out despite the go-slow orders.
A patched-over bikie was shot in the leg by his former gang in Marrickville at the start of the year. East from there, a shop was opened around the corner from another shop in similar business, this one owned by a gang.
The new shop owners were told they could remain open provided they paid taxes to the gang. Just months later, the owner struggling to meet his payments, his shop was trashed. The business is now closed.
Incidences such as these are not being reported to police. The victims are too scared. The gangs have their own doctors, even vets, who treat non-life-threatening wounds such as the Marrickville shooting.
As for Orrock, the car-bombing was not a genuine attempt at his life but merely a warning. The Nomads have told Orrock they are prepared to let him walk away on one proviso: he signs over ownership of his two tattoo parlours to the club.
This is particularly bad news.
A bikie lifer, he found protection from the Nomads among the Hells Angels. In the Angels, he had the backing to take on whatever the Nomads came at him with.
For a brief while, anyway.
There was a fallout at a Christmas party, at which the Angels have told him he can remain on one proviso. He signs over his two tattoo parlours to the club.