Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs Read Free Page A

their own had become a prospect – probationary member – of their despised rivals, the Leicestershire-basedRatae MC. Maintaining absolute control over territory is the first order of business for all motorcycle gangs, but also one of their greatest challenges. Each weekend and as often as possible during the week, the Pagans would gather together and try to get around as much of their turf as possible, partly to remind people that they were in charge but also to give potential recruits the opportunity to approach them.
    A favoured watering hole was a lively Irish bar called O’Malleys in Rugby, a few miles from the Leicestershire border. But with so much other ground to cover and no members living nearby, it simply wasn’t practical for the Pagans to drink there more than once in a blue moon.
    The Ratae, who had already expanded to the north and east by forging close links with bikers in other counties, were quick to sense an opportunity. Keen to gain new ground closer to home, Warwickshire seemed a good place to start and Rugby, with its biker-friendly bar and apparent lack of serious opposition, quickly rose to the top of their hit list.
    It was while the Ratae were drinking in O’Malleys that they happened across a local biker who expressed an interest in becoming part of the MC scene. After letting him hang around with them for a while and checking into his background, the gang offered him the chance to become a prospect, an invitation he eagerly accepted.
    Once Boone and the rest of the Pagans learned what had happened, their objection was a simple one: if the man wanted to join the Ratae, he would have to move to Leicestershire. As a resident of Warwickshire with an interest in MCs, he should have approached the Pagans in thefirst instance (though he had now blown his chances of ever being accepted by them). His counter-argument was equally simple: he never saw the Pagans in his area, but the Ratae were there regularly so he assumed the town belonged to them.
    In truth, the prospect was being used as a pawn. The Ratae knew full well that O’Malleys was outside their turf and wanted to see how far the Warwickshire gang were willing to go to defend it. The Pagans had made plenty of threats, but did they have the balls to follow any of them through? So far as the Pagans were concerned, their credibility was on the line, as was their place as the dominant MC in Warwickshire. The Ratae had left them no choice: they had to do something.
    An MC is a band of brothers like no other and becoming a fully patched member of one is a lengthy and deeply involved process that is the same all over the world. It is made deliberately difficult, partly to weed out the unsuitable and ensure full commitment to the lifestyle but also to prevent undercover law enforcement officials from gaining access to a club in all but the most extreme circumstances.
    The road to a full patch begins as an official hangaround. To attain this status a biker might typically have met several members of a club through drinking at their regular bar, attending rallies or even being a guest of another hangaround at the clubhouse.
    Compared to what follows, the hangaround stage is something of a honeymoon period. The club has no real claim on the potential recruit and cannot call on him to take part in anything more than the most rudimentary activities. Likewise, while the biker is able to attend certainclub events and literally hang around in the clubhouse in order to get to know all the members of a chapter (and vice versa), they have no official association with the club.
    It is at this stage that clubs are particularly on the lookout for those attempting to join with a specific agenda in mind. There have been countless cases of bikers who have been bullied or harassed in some way and decided to get their own back by trying to join an MC. They figure that once they are in they can take advantage of the ‘one in, all in’ rule to drag an entire chapter