OFF THE WIRE
Nomads member David Spiteri has written a warts and all book that is a true account, or so he says, of life as a bikie Source: The Sunday Telegraph
POLICE say publisher HarperCollins risks glamorising violence by publishing a "true crime" novel by a member of the Nomads bikie gang.
First-time author David Spiteri, 63, a veteran Nomads member and senior figure in the club's Byron Bay chapter, uses his new book The Prez to detail bikies' involvement in drug manufacturing, corruption and shocking brutality.
Mr Spiteri claims the book, to be published on March 1, is a truthful account of real events, although he has changed the details of names and places.
After a life embroiled in the sex, drugs and violence of the Nomads outlaw motorcycle gang, David Spiteri is a little disappointed.
His son has become a lawyer.
"I was kind of hoping he'd go into rock and roll," sighs Spiteri, sipping a beer on the front veranda of his elegant timber home near Bangalow, in northern NSW.
We've been eating Spiteri's homemade fruitcake and talking about his extraordinary decision to publish a thinly veiled "crime fiction" account of life in the Nomads, the gang in which he is still a senior member.
The book is called The Prez, and its central character is an Italian-Australian kid from the western suburbs of Sydney who helps found a bikie gang called the Miners. The character, Winnie, commits assault and murder, participates in a brutal gang turf war, oversees the industrial-scale cultivation of marijuana and ice manufacture, and bribes senior NSW police officers and politicians.
Spiteri, in real life, is a Maltese-Australian kid from the western suburbs of Sydney who is a long-standing member of the Nomads, one of the bikie gangs regarded by police as a sophisticated organised-crime network controlling interests from drug trafficking to standover rackets, all sheltered by business fronts ranging from tattoo parlours to smash repairers and nightclubs.
"It's all true. Everything in the book is true," says Spiteri, whose shoulder-length grey mullet and thick beard cut a striking impression on the streets of pretty little Bangalow, a gentrified country town cluttered with tea-shops.
"I purposely didn't put any bullshit in there."
This is Spiteri's first interview -- in fact he has spent most of his life avoiding attention, except when he's on the back of his bike.
He rides an enormous motorcycle, which bears a Harley-Davidson badge despite the fact Spiteri put it together himself. "I had the most unbelievable battle with the RTA to get it licensed," he says as he gently wheels it out of its garage to be photographed. "Took bloody forever. They kept demanding to see paperwork for this and that and making me change things."
Spiteri, who went to the same Catholic school -- Bankstown's De La Salle College -- as former prime minister Paul Keating, joined the Nomads as a teenager, about the same time he joined the RAN as a cook, and is still a member of the gang today. In 1986, after two decades of balancing bikie adventures with deployments to sea, he moved north to start a Byron Bay chapter of the gang. He was injured in a motorcycle accident a decade ago and, in his subsequent two years in and out of hospital, he decided to write.
"People kept bringing me books to read in hospital about bikies," he says. "They were all the most unbelievable shit. Sensational, soulless, garbage."
So Spiteri began hand-writing his own book in a series of school exercise books, which he keeps in a pristine plastic box.
The back-cover blurb says Spiteri "puts himself at risk to reveal everything from the drug trade which funds the clubs' operations to the extreme violence that continues to make them infamous."
"People think all we do is bash people, rape people, doing nasty things -- not naughty things, but nasty things," he says.
"They don't have any fun in those books. There's no sense of humour in there. We're funny buggers too, you know. We have families, we have mortgages. We are normal people."
But clubs deliberately cultivate a brutal reputation, don't they?
"Only to people who deserve it," Spiteri says.
"The amount of times that I still have people come and say 'Oh David, this is happening, what can you do to help me?' These days I am very careful about who I help and why, because you rarely hear the full story. I will find out the full story before I'll go and talk to people. I don't go and bash people. I'll go and talk. That's the only thing I have to do."
He claims bikie gangs flourished after the 1984 Milperra massacre in Sydney's west -- in which six bikies and one civilian were killed in a shootout between rival gangs.
"The trial showed their loyalty to one another. They stood together. It was a real sense of belonging. And there's a lot of people out there that don't really get accepted. They join a motorcycle club for that sense of acceptance."
Detective Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis, commander of the NSW Police gangs squad, can understand that.
"But outlaw motorcycle gangs have changed completely since that time," Katsogiannis says. He cites the fact police officers from Strike Force Metter were able to convince two patched bikies to turn informants over a 2009 Sydney airport brawl in which a Hells Angel associate was beaten to death. The supergrass evidence saw Comanchero boss Mick Hawi convicted of murder and other bikies convicted of lesser offences. "That bond of loyalty has long gone," Katsogiannis says. "It's fractured and broken now. In the 1960s it might have been about camaraderie; they were still involved in manufacturing speed and MDMA and going to the pub and drinking.
"Now the outlaw motorcycle gangs are a lot more business-savvy. They're using BlackBerrys and Skype to communicate, they use professional advisers and accountants and solicitors to launder money."
And have no doubt, the gangs are "brutal, especially to fresh recruits," says Katsogiannis, adding he's "disappointed" to see their brutality glamourised in popular culture.
He cites one particularly shocking episode where a drug cook employed by one of the bikie gangs was found to have produced substandard batches. "What they did was absolutely sickening. He was lured to a meeting and then they proceeded to bash him so severely that he fractured his eye sockets, his cheekbones and his ribs.
"They tied him to a chair and poured boiling hot water on him. The X-rays showed sand, cigarette butts and leaves in this stomach. Now this individual is left a vegetable.
"That's a snapshot."
Spiteri says his only convictions are minor marijuana counts, for which he did community service work, including organising billycart races. He brought the rest of the Nomads along to help supervise.
He's adamant the Nomads -- and bikies generally "don't sell heroin, never," Spiteri says. "We've seen what it can do and what you do to get it. You don't care about anything but that next hit. You don't care about anyone, your club, your family. It's a soul-destroying drug."
But they make methamphetamine, I say. What's the difference?
"I don't think speed's as bad as heroin. Heroin's an addiction that you have to go and get. If you don't have speed, too bad. But heroin is a soul-destroying drug. That's why they should legalise drugs. Honestly. The amount of resources they put into trying to stop drugs, and what results from it is crime."
Spiteri doesn't personally confess to any major crimes, but he insists on the truth of incidents described in the book, including the routine bribing of senior NSW police and senior politicians including one mad punter known as "The Minister" who accepts bikies' tips on fixed horse-races, and arranges for criminal charges to melt away.
"That is true. That happened. But I'm not going to tell you his name," Spiteri says. He denies it was Rex Jackson, the 1980s NSW Labor prisons minister who was sacked and went to jail for corruption in 1987.
Spiteri's female characters are either wives - tough, resigned characters who don't want to know too much about what their blokes are up to - or gorgeous, promiscuous girls who volunteer for group sex.
"I'll tell you what. A lot of women come to our clubhouse. They'll get everything they do want and nothing they don't want. It's respect. You don't rape women. We don't, anyway, and I know most bike clubs are the same. A lot of bikers have got daughters. How would they like their daughters to get raped?"
His own daughter is now at university studying to be a social worker. Spiteri is immensely proud of her for choosing such an honourable and low-paid field of work, as he is of his son.
So if his account is true, why are women so into bikies? "Naughty boys," he says. "Not bad, but naughty. Naughty but nice. If anything, the women used us, in a strange sort of way. They get attracted to bikies. Then they go off and marry some doctor. In Lismore once, I walked through the supermarket one day and saw this sheila. She just wouldn't make eye contact with me. That's all right -- she was with her husband. I knew she didn't want him to know that she knew me."
He laughs.
"That's all right," he says. "I'm quite happy with the way I've lived. I've always done the right thing."
The Prez by David Spiteri, published by HarperCollins, will be out on March 1. RRP $32.99
Spiteri, in real life, is a Maltese-Australian kid from the western suburbs of Sydney who is a long-standing member of the Nomads, one of the bikie gangs regarded by police as a sophisticated organised-crime network controlling interests from drug trafficking to standover rackets, all sheltered by business fronts ranging from tattoo parlours to smash repairers and nightclubs.
"It's all true. Everything in the book is true," says Spiteri, whose shoulder-length grey mullet and thick beard cut a striking impression on the streets of pretty little Bangalow, a gentrified country town cluttered with tea-shops.
"I purposely didn't put any bullshit in there."
This is Spiteri's first interview -- in fact he has spent most of his life avoiding attention, except when he's on the back of his bike.
He rides an enormous motorcycle, which bears a Harley-Davidson badge despite the fact Spiteri put it together himself. "I had the most unbelievable battle with the RTA to get it licensed," he says as he gently wheels it out of its garage to be photographed. "Took bloody forever. They kept demanding to see paperwork for this and that and making me change things."
Spiteri, who went to the same Catholic school -- Bankstown's De La Salle College -- as former prime minister Paul Keating, joined the Nomads as a teenager, about the same time he joined the RAN as a cook, and is still a member of the gang today. In 1986, after two decades of balancing bikie adventures with deployments to sea, he moved north to start a Byron Bay chapter of the gang. He was injured in a motorcycle accident a decade ago and, in his subsequent two years in and out of hospital, he decided to write.
"People kept bringing me books to read in hospital about bikies," he says. "They were all the most unbelievable shit. Sensational, soulless, garbage."
So Spiteri began hand-writing his own book in a series of school exercise books, which he keeps in a pristine plastic box.
The back-cover blurb says Spiteri "puts himself at risk to reveal everything from the drug trade which funds the clubs' operations to the extreme violence that continues to make them infamous."
"People think all we do is bash people, rape people, doing nasty things -- not naughty things, but nasty things," he says.
"They don't have any fun in those books. There's no sense of humour in there. We're funny buggers too, you know. We have families, we have mortgages. We are normal people."
But clubs deliberately cultivate a brutal reputation, don't they?
"Only to people who deserve it," Spiteri says.
"The amount of times that I still have people come and say 'Oh David, this is happening, what can you do to help me?' These days I am very careful about who I help and why, because you rarely hear the full story. I will find out the full story before I'll go and talk to people. I don't go and bash people. I'll go and talk. That's the only thing I have to do."
He claims bikie gangs flourished after the 1984 Milperra massacre in Sydney's west -- in which six bikies and one civilian were killed in a shootout between rival gangs.
"The trial showed their loyalty to one another. They stood together. It was a real sense of belonging. And there's a lot of people out there that don't really get accepted. They join a motorcycle club for that sense of acceptance."
Detective Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis, commander of the NSW Police gangs squad, can understand that.
"But outlaw motorcycle gangs have changed completely since that time," Katsogiannis says. He cites the fact police officers from Strike Force Metter were able to convince two patched bikies to turn informants over a 2009 Sydney airport brawl in which a Hells Angel associate was beaten to death. The supergrass evidence saw Comanchero boss Mick Hawi convicted of murder and other bikies convicted of lesser offences. "That bond of loyalty has long gone," Katsogiannis says. "It's fractured and broken now. In the 1960s it might have been about camaraderie; they were still involved in manufacturing speed and MDMA and going to the pub and drinking.
"Now the outlaw motorcycle gangs are a lot more business-savvy. They're using BlackBerrys and Skype to communicate, they use professional advisers and accountants and solicitors to launder money."
And have no doubt, the gangs are "brutal, especially to fresh recruits," says Katsogiannis, adding he's "disappointed" to see their brutality glamourised in popular culture.
He cites one particularly shocking episode where a drug cook employed by one of the bikie gangs was found to have produced substandard batches. "What they did was absolutely sickening. He was lured to a meeting and then they proceeded to bash him so severely that he fractured his eye sockets, his cheekbones and his ribs.
"They tied him to a chair and poured boiling hot water on him. The X-rays showed sand, cigarette butts and leaves in this stomach. Now this individual is left a vegetable.
"That's a snapshot."
Spiteri says his only convictions are minor marijuana counts, for which he did community service work, including organising billycart races. He brought the rest of the Nomads along to help supervise.
He's adamant the Nomads -- and bikies generally "don't sell heroin, never," Spiteri says. "We've seen what it can do and what you do to get it. You don't care about anything but that next hit. You don't care about anyone, your club, your family. It's a soul-destroying drug."
But they make methamphetamine, I say. What's the difference?
"I don't think speed's as bad as heroin. Heroin's an addiction that you have to go and get. If you don't have speed, too bad. But heroin is a soul-destroying drug. That's why they should legalise drugs. Honestly. The amount of resources they put into trying to stop drugs, and what results from it is crime."
Spiteri doesn't personally confess to any major crimes, but he insists on the truth of incidents described in the book, including the routine bribing of senior NSW police and senior politicians including one mad punter known as "The Minister" who accepts bikies' tips on fixed horse-races, and arranges for criminal charges to melt away.
"That is true. That happened. But I'm not going to tell you his name," Spiteri says. He denies it was Rex Jackson, the 1980s NSW Labor prisons minister who was sacked and went to jail for corruption in 1987.
Spiteri's female characters are either wives - tough, resigned characters who don't want to know too much about what their blokes are up to - or gorgeous, promiscuous girls who volunteer for group sex.
"I'll tell you what. A lot of women come to our clubhouse. They'll get everything they do want and nothing they don't want. It's respect. You don't rape women. We don't, anyway, and I know most bike clubs are the same. A lot of bikers have got daughters. How would they like their daughters to get raped?"
His own daughter is now at university studying to be a social worker. Spiteri is immensely proud of her for choosing such an honourable and low-paid field of work, as he is of his son.
So if his account is true, why are women so into bikies? "Naughty boys," he says. "Not bad, but naughty. Naughty but nice. If anything, the women used us, in a strange sort of way. They get attracted to bikies. Then they go off and marry some doctor. In Lismore once, I walked through the supermarket one day and saw this sheila. She just wouldn't make eye contact with me. That's all right -- she was with her husband. I knew she didn't want him to know that she knew me."
He laughs.
"That's all right," he says. "I'm quite happy with the way I've lived. I've always done the right thing."
The Prez by David Spiteri, published by HarperCollins, will be out on March 1. RRP $32.99
