OFF THE WIRE
WHAT sort of a man allows his son to join a gxxg that gets the boy killed in a gunfight?
Then refuses to help police find the killer because of a "code of honour"?
Answer: Adelaide bikie Vincenzo Focarelli, who drove himself to hospital last Sunday with gunshot wounds -- and his 22-year-old stepson Giovanni dead beside him.
Focarelli senior has been shot before and the target of a failed bomb attack among other attempts on his life.
He is a self-styled leader of the Comancheros motorcycle gxxg. Young Giovanni was one of his members. Nice one, Dad.
In another matter entirely, Adelaide police are investigating a feud between Finks and Hells Angels following the shooting and wounding of a Finks member's son last year.
The boy is 11.
His life is at risk because he was born into a "band of brothers" who routinely put their own and other families in danger.
What sort of men build a remote control bomb, fit it to a car - knowing the owner will be carrying passengers and driving around in public - and then detonate it, killing two people just to get one?
Answer: the crew that killed former detective Don "the Silver Fox" Hancock and his friend Lew Lewis by blowing up Lewis's car as he dropped Hancock at his home in suburban Perth in September 2001.
Lewis was a totally innocent party.
But the bomb makers apparently believed Hancock had shot one of their mates after a stupid confrontation in his pub near Kalgoorlie the previous year.
These were Gypsy Jokers - another outlaw motorcycle gxxg, naturally.
What sort of men send a warning - or a twisted "reward" - to a jailed former associate by ordering the murder of the prisoner's ex-wife?
That's what happened when Vicki Jacobs, a Ballarat clergyman's daughter, was shot dead as she slept beside her young son in their Bendigo unit in June, 1999.
Vicki's "crime"? She had given evidence against her ex-husband, the father of the little boy who woke to find his mother's cold, blood-soaked body.
The father, by the way, had been convicted over shooting three men in Adelaide on the orders of a Hells Angel who had befriended him in jail earlier.
And what was all this bloodshed about?
It was no crime of passion.
Not even revenge, really.
It was nothing but a turf war over drugs.
Children were orphaned by a commercial decision by ugly middle-aged men to protect grubby, greedy rackets.
One of the men suspected of Vicki Jacobs' murder was later killed when a tree fell on him, an event that suggests there is a God.
But when a reporter and photographer covered the funeral, a bikie enforcer grabbed the photographer's wallet, identified him and said words to the effect: "We know who you are and where you live, so no pictures - or else."
Threats don't come much more explicit.
After all, one of the men believed to be behind Vicki Jacobs' death had also burned down several shops and houses to intimidate people.
(And he sexually assaulted young girls, an offence that even the Angels could not stomach.)
There's plenty more room on the Bikie Dishonour Board.
The "Ballroom Blitz" was a pitched battle with guns, knives, knuckledusters and chairs at a Gold Coast kickboxing tournament in 2006.
It was between Finks and Hells Angels.
Do tell.
At its centre was one Christopher Wayne Hudson, who was shot and wounded by his former Fink friend Shane Bowden for daring to leave the Finks and join the Angels. Sadly, Hudson recovered. If he hadn't, he would not have been able to visit Melbourne the following year, almost certainly acting as a standover man for his new gxxg.
After an all-night drug binge, he shot dead a brave man called Brendan Keilar and wounded a Dutch backpacker called Paul de Waard, both of whom had tried to stop him bashing his girlfriend, Kaera Douglas.
Hudson had, of course, been hanging out in a King St strip joint, Spearmint Rhino, where he had previously befriended Collingwood footballer Alan Didak.
It was revealed that only days before the shootings, Didak had left the club with Hudson, who then allegedly fired random shots from his car before providing a jolly night's entertainment at the Hells Angels' East County Chapter headquarters in Campbellfield.
Hudson is serving an extremely long sentence, and Didak is unlikely to be joining Mensa after Collingwood finishes with him.
Meanwhile, Spearmint Rhino is again in the news ...again involving Hells Angels.
Of course.
Then there's Sydney, mother lode of Australian crime and corruption from when the first convicts landed.
Since bent cops and politicians were rumbled running all the harbour city rackets, bike gxxgs have taken over there, too.
Such as the morons who committed the Milperra Massacre on Father's Day, 1984.
Six bikers died in a suburban pub carpark. Worse, a 14-year-old girl was killed in the crossfire between Comancheros and Bandidos.
Those names keep coming up.
Milperra produced 63 murder and 147 manslaughter convictions in a marathon trial.
Books were written, TV dramas made, legal reputations won and lost. But none of it brought back Leanne Walters, the schoolgirl who walked past at the wrong time.
A quarter of a century later, a new breed of Middle Eastern and islander bash artists, drug dealers and drive-by shooters are joining old gangs and ratcheting up tensions by starting new ones.
Such as the geniuses who battled in broad daylight at Sydney Airport in March 2009, beating a man to death in front of horrified passengers.
The combatants? Hells Angels and Comancheros.
In Darwin, biker gxxgs have run drug and gun rackets for years, infiltrating army units and pilfering weapons and equipment.
And Tasmania has become a favourite hideaway for bikies who regularly ride the Spirit of Tasmania across the strait.
This not because they are afraid of flying.
Cynics might suggest it's because they are trafficking guns and drugs back and forth.
Tasmanian police and politicians get shrill at such accusations but it's accepted in the underworld that black market guns are still relatively easy to get in Tassie and that its sparse population, cheap real estate and docile cops make it a great place to "cook" illicit drugs for the mainland market.
Did someone mention the Black Uhlans?
Bikie gxxgs like to call themselves the "one per centers".
But they are not romantic rebels.
They are more like cane toads: ugly, poisonous and multiplying rapidly.
After the Hancock bombing in Perth a police chief wore a "99%" badge to show the outlaw gxxgs were outnumbered by the rest of us.
A neat gesture but a decade later, the cane toads still seem to be spreading.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/bad-to-the-bone-the-war-were-not-winning-against-bikies/story-e6frfhqf-1226261288105
