Waco shootout: who are the Bandidos motorcycle gang?
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Version 0 of 1. “We’re the people your parents warned you about,” reads an old Bandidos motto. Related: Nine dead and 18 injured in Waco, Texas biker gang shooting – in pictures After the biker gang was one of five involved in a shootout in Waco, Texas, which left nine dead and 18 injured on Sunday, your parents are probably not the only people warning you to steer clear of the Bandidos’ path. The shootout, which began shortly after midday in a shopping center, involved 200 gang members, nearly 100 weapons – including guns and knives – and hundreds of shell casings left behind on the blood-stained parking lot floor. Though police aren’t specifically naming the groups involved, the McLennan county sheriff, Parnell McNamara, whose office is involved in the investigation, said all nine who were killed were members of either the Bandidos or the Cossacks gangs. “Bandidos pride themselves on being the baddest of the bad,” Julian Sher, an investigative journalist who has written several books on biker gangs, told the Guardian. In the Waco brawl, the Bandidos are the most important criminal outfit, he said, with the other members local small fry who are “very meaningless on a global scale”. In photographs of the arrests, men could be seen wearing uniforms of the Bandidos, Cossacks and Scimitars biker gangs. The Bandidos Motorcycle Club is considered one of the world’s largest biker gangs, with as many as 2,500 members in 13 countries, according to the US Department of Justice. They are second only to the more renowned Hells Angels in terms of their power, global reach and levels of violence. In a 2014 gang threat assessment, the Texas department of public safety classified the group as a “Tier 2 threat”, the second highest. This gives the group a similar ranking to the Bloods, Crips and Aryan Brotherhood, who the report says are collectively “responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime across urban, suburban and rural areas of Texas”. The US DoJ considers the Bandidos – with their 900 US members belonging to roughly 93 chapters – to be a growing criminal threat to US law enforcement, as the gang continues to actively expand, by allowing supporting clubs and members to swear allegiance to the Bandidos mother club. According to Steve Cook, a Kansas City law enforcement officer who says he worked undercover in a motorcycle gang in the early 2000s, Texas is an emerging battleground for outlaw motorcycle gangs. “We were pretty certain that some kind of incident was on the horizon,” Cook told Vox. Cook, the executive director of the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association, is due to hold a conference on Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs for local police in Waco next month. The Bandidos originated in Texas, and have always been a Texas-based outfit, Sher said. According to Bandidos lore, the group was founded in March 1966 by Donald Chambers, a 36-year-old working on the docks in Houston, who grew bored of various Houston-area motorcycle clubs. According to one of his first recruits, Chambers “wanted the badass bikers who cared about nothing except riding full time on their Harley-Davidsons. He wanted bikers who lived only for the open road. No rules, no bullshit, just the open road.” In the decades immediately after the second world war, motorcycle clubs and gangs were seen as an informal means for disaffected young men to combat war trauma and alienation from the countries they left behind, according to William L Dulaney in the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. Motorcycle clubs and biker gangs have been accused of flouting laws since at least 1947, when 4,000 motorcyclists flocked to Hollister, California, and were found to be drunk and disorderly, gaining national attention. The Hells Angels were founded one year later. The founding ethos of the gang may have been, “just the open road”, but the Bandidos have grown into one of the largest domestic crime syndicates in the US. Bandidos are involved in transporting and distributing cocaine and marijuana, according to the DoJ, and are involved in the production, transportation and distribution of methamphetamine. A 2013 FBI report linked the Bandidos to Los Zetas, the notorious Mexican cartel. The Waco shootout is but the latest in a long list of public violence involving biker gangs. Don Chambers was arrested in 1972 alongside two other Bandidos for killing two drug dealers in El Paso. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, as part of a wave of imprisonments of bike gang leaders in the 1970s. But the past three decades have seen bursts of biker gang violence. Almost every major bike war involved the Bandidos. More than 160 people were killed over several years in the Quebec biker war of the late 1990s and 2000s, and in the Great Nordic war of the mid-1990s, in which Hells Angels fought Bandidos in Scandinavia, 12 people were killed and hundreds injured. A violent shootout in Australia, which came to be known as the Milperra Massacre, killed seven and wounded 28 near Sydney in 1984. The Waco incident will not tarnish their image, Sher said. It might even help bolster their recruitment. According to Sher, the Bandidos’ recruits, like other similar biker gangs, are young men (women are barred) in their 20s, who are mostly white and often racist. “If you join the Bandidos, even if you’re not a criminal, you’re going to be hanging out with criminals,” said Sher. “It’s a criminal network.” Though gang leaders routinely got arrested, biker gangs, unlike the mafia, did not have a pyramid structure, Sher said. “They have leaders but each chapter is very autonomous. The shooting won’t affect other chapters around the country or the world.” He added: “Bandidos are calling themselves bandits. They saw the Hells Angels as ‘too soft’. They are criminals and we should be taking people for what they are.” Sher decried a certain “romantic appeal” that seemingly imbues popular American perceptions of biker gangs, particularly in movies and television. From the 1953 Marlon Brandon film The Wild One to Sons of Anarchy, a hugely popular television show which centers on a California motorcycle club, motorcycle gangs have long been a part of the American cinematic landscape. “Bikers fit into the narrative of the ‘lovable outlaw’, the Clint Eastwood loner or rebel, the Easy Rider,” Sher said. “It’s a big part of the American tradition. Whereas in Europe and Canada, bikers are seen as criminals, in the US, they are seen as rebels who are occasionally involved in criminality.” But “biker gangs are America’s crime export to the world”, Sher said. The Bandidos did not immediately return a request for comment. |