Are you interested in an in-depth exploration of the Bandidos? Would you like to learn more about the activities of this motorcycle gang? Discover the history of this motorcycle group, its founders and how it has thrived as a symbol of the motorcycle world for decades now?
Young biker of modern times, welcome to our online store. Here, we’re talking big bikes, passion for the open road, and today we’re diving into the details of one of the most famous biker gangs of all time: the Bandidos! 🤠
The Bandidos are one of the most important biker gangs, having originated in the United States. Today, there are over 2,500 members worldwide. The gang’s activities are mainly criminal, and clashes with other MCs are frequent. 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
In this article, you’ll discover, among other things:
- The origin of the club
- The MC’s activities
- The number of clans worldwide
- The history and origins of this club
- Some surprising facts about this gang
After reading this article, the myths surrounding the Bandidos will hold no secrets for you! Without further ado, let’s dive right in! 👇
The Bandidos biker gang has a saying: “Stab a single one of our members, and we all bleed.”
It’s not clear who started the assaults, but there was plenty of carnage when the Bandidos violently clashed with members of several other biker gangs at a restaurant in Waco, Texas. A savage daylight shootout left 9 dead, 18 wounded and led to the arrest of at least 165 bikers.
The confrontation began around noon in a restaurant called Twin Peaks, located in a shopping center, and quickly escalated into all-out war, according to Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, a police spokesman. At one point, up to 30 gang members were shooting at each other in the restaurant’s parking lot. Police discovered more than 100 weapons and dozens of shell casings.
This shooting marks the latest chapter, perhaps the bloodiest, in a long history of violence involving motorcycle gangs in the United States. The Bandidos, like their better-known rivals the Hells Angels or the Vagos MC, are frequent figures in this dark history. The group is generally considered the second largest motorcycle gang in the world, after the Hells Angels, with no fewer than 2,500 members in 13 different countries, according to the Department of Justice.
The story of the Bandidos traces the origins of biker gangs, from counter-culture clubs to fearsome criminal organizations, and helps explain why tragedy struck this city, already associated with unheard-of violence.
1) The Origin of the Biker Gang
These days, if Americans have any knowledge of biker gangs, it’s probably thanks to Hunter S. Thompson or the hit TV series Sons of Anarchy. However, long before Thompson’s 1966 book Hell’s Angels, biker gangs were already on the rise in the USA.
American biker gangs originated after the Second World War. Tens of thousands of disillusioned young men, often traumatized by the war, returned to a country they no longer recognized. Many rejected this reality. “At the end of World War II, many young men returned from combat in droves,” wrote William L. Dulaney in 2005 in the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. “For many, the return to a peaceful civilian life was far more monotonous than they could bear. Some veterans trained to ride motorcycles, particularly Harley Davidsons and Indians, while serving overseas.”
“Returning veterans used their severance pay to buy motorcycles and party in taverns,” writes James F. Quinn, a professor at the University of North Texas who has studied motorcycle gang behavior. “Thrill-seeking led some veterans to choose a motorcycle-centric, community-based lifestyle. They viewed their military experiences in a positive light, as well as the intense camaraderie they’d experienced there, making such a lifestyle attractive.”
In some cases, veterans who couldn’t stand military discipline adopted “master” roles within gangs. For them, identification with the small-group camaraderie and risk-taking image of military service was more important than the conventional activities offered by society. These men risked losing their identity, camaraderie and security once their military commitment was over.
Signs of trouble were present even before motorcycle gangs became official. On the weekend of July 4, 1947, some 4,000 bikers invaded the small town of Hollister, California, wreaking havoc. The Hells Angels were founded about a year later. The profile of the Hells Angels, as described by Thompson in 1966, emerged as they expanded across the country, prompting dramatic reactions.
“They’re called the Hells Angels,” began a 1965 magazine article quoted in Thompson’s book. “They ride, fight and raid like marauding cavalry. They boast that not even the police force can break their brotherhood of criminal bikers.”
2) Creation of the 1% Motorcycle Club
“We’re the 1%, man, the ones who don’t conform to any standards and don’t care,” one of the Hells Angels told Thompson. “So don’t tell me about your medical bills and search warrants. What I mean is, you’ve got your wife, your motorcycle, your banjo, and we’re already on our way. We’ve survived a lot of trouble, we’ve stayed alive with our boots and our fists. We’re royalty among outlaw bikers, baby.”
The Hells Angels may have been the first, but they were far from the only ones. Dozens of other motorcycle gangs sprang up across the United States. Most, if not all, sought to embody the archetypal American outlaw, as evidenced by their rebellious names: the Outlaws, the Pagans, the Warlocks, the Mongols and the Bandidos.
The Bandidos appeared almost 20 years after the Hells Angels, but the two gangs quickly became formidable rivals. According to motorcycle club legend, their founder, Donald Chambers, was bored with other motorcycle clubs. “Chambers formed the Bandidos in March 1966, when he was 36 and working the Houston docks,” wrote Skip Hollandsworth in a 2007 article about the gang. “He told friends he was naming his club the Bandidos, after Mexican bandits who refused to live by anyone’s rules but their own, and he began recruiting his first members not only in Houston but also in the biker bars of Corpus Christi, Galveston and San Antonio.”
“Don wasn’t looking for people who would fit into what he called ‘polite society’,” one of the group’s early members told Hollandsworth. “He wanted bikers who didn’t care about anything except riding their Harley-Davidson full-time. He wanted bikers who lived for the road. No rules, no constraints…, just the road”.
However, as the Hells Angels and Bandidos grew, they evolved from free-spirited counterculture clubs into ruthless organized crime syndicates. This assertion comes from academics who study these groups, but also from the prosecutors who bring them to justice.
3) From Biker Gang to Organized Crime
“The desire to dominate rivals has temporarily diminished the importance of core subculture values among many clubs. At the same time, it has fostered their dependence on organized crime activities,” writes Quinn. “With the extreme escalation of violence used in internal wars, these activities could no longer be concealed by the milieu’s famous ‘code of silence’. It was only then that law enforcement finally began to take these clubs seriously.”
“In the late 1970s, local police and federal investigations began to uncover the involvement of several “1%” (outlaw motorcycle clubs) in drug trafficking, organized robbery, extortion and prostitution rings,” Quinn wrote. Chambers was arrested in 1972, along with two other members of the Bandidos, for killing two drug dealers in El Paso. “Police said that before killing the dealers, Chambers had them dig their own graves,” writes Hollandsworth. “Then Donald and the other Bandidos set their bodies on fire before burying them.” Chambers was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
The arrest and incarceration of biker gang leaders in the 1970s led to what Quinn calls a “retreat”, during which a second generation of leaders ended the violence and focused on making greater profits through better management of drug trafficking and other criminal activities.
However, the last three decades have been marked by repeated conflicts between biker gangs, often abroad. In the 1980s, the Bandidos and Hells Angels became international organizations. In 1984, a shootout between the Bandidos and another gang called the Comancheros left seven dead and 28 wounded in Milperra, Australia, near Sydney. This incident became known as the “Milperra Massacre”.
Bikers follow the funeral procession of Uffe Larsen, local leader of the Bandidos motorcycle gang, after a rival member of the Hells Angels shot him dead at Copenhagen airport in 1996. Around 150 Bandidos gang members from Europe, the USA and Australia gathered in a 16th-century church, where Larsen’s body lay in a coffin covered with sheets in the gang’s orange and yellow colors.
4) The Violence of Gang Wars
In the mid-1990s, a “great Nordic biker war” between the Bandidos and the Hells Angels broke out in Scandinavia. At least 12 people died and almost 100 were injured in the three-year confrontation. The war was characterized by the unprecedented use of firearms in a gang rivalry. “These hostilities involved military and automatic weapons,” writes Quinn. At one point, the Hells Angels threw a grenade at a prison where an enemy leader was being held.
The two biker gangs clashed again in Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This time, the conflict, dubbed “La Guerre des Motards du Québec”, claimed 150 victims. The conflict largely ended in April 2006, when authorities discovered eight dead Bandidos in a field near Toronto. In 2009, a former police officer on trial for the murders accused Jeff Pike, the Bandidos’ world president, of masterminding the killings. The former policeman and five others were convicted of the crime. Pike denied the charges and was never indicted.
“I’m just a hard-core American who loves riding his motorcycle,” Pike told Hollandsworth. “You’d be surprised. I’m in bed most days by 10 p.m.” However, Steve Cook asserts that this claim, while surprising and amusing, is simply window dressing. Cook is a Kansas City-area police officer who claims to have infiltrated gangs affiliated with the Bandidos.
“These individuals are members of organized crime, but they’re also domestic terrorists,” he told the Washington Post. “They are heavily involved in methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana trafficking, as well as motorcycle theft. These are fundamental activities for them. The problem is that these individuals want to present themselves as motorcycle enthusiasts who simply enjoy riding. The evidence is to the contrary.
Cook says that most Americans, including many police officers, don’t take motorcycle gangs seriously enough because “people get too seduced” by the idea that bikers are modern bandits.
They watch Sons of Anarchy and some of their little TV shows. These individuals all seem nice enough: they’re misunderstood, like outlaws of yesteryear, and they ride motorcycles rather than horses,” he said. “Even the police say, ‘Oh, they’re just long-haired, tattooed guys who like to ride motorcycles’. But the reality is that these are long-haired, tattooed individuals who ride motorcycles, sell a considerable amount of methamphetamine, commit murder, steal motorcycles, extort people, then assault them in bars for no good reason.
5) Bandidos VS Hells Angels, A Great Rivalry
In fact, Cook says the Waco shootout bears a striking resemblance to previous battles between the Bandidos and the Hells Angels. Citing police sources in Waco, Cook says the shootout erupted when the Cossacks, a smaller gang backed by the Hells Angels, challenged the Bandidos for control of Texas. Several other biker gangs could have joined the battle, angered by the recent murders of Bandidos members.
“My impression is that the Cossacks have flirted with the Hells Angels,” said Cook. “If I were a Bandido, my immediate reaction would be, ‘These guys are going to try to take over our state by forming an international gang, which will cause a war.'”
One way or another, war broke out in Waco. Customers at Twin Peaks, a restaurant chain known for its rather sexy waitresses, took refuge behind tables, chairs and cars, seeking to dodge bullets as bikers clashed. Photos of the crime scene show bodies covered in yellow tarpaulins, surrounded by numerous shiny motorcycles.
“The Bandidos already knew the Cossacks wouldn’t play ball, and when push came to shove and these guys didn’t cooperate, all hell broke loose,” Cook said. Indeed, in addition to being a police officer, Cook runs a group called the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association. This association is dedicated to fighting local biker gangs. Cook says he knew tensions were high between the gangs, which led him to anticipate this event in Waco. “You can be sure that, given the number of weapons involved, these guys had planned and had come looking for conflict. They were prepared.”
Cook hopes the shooting will draw more attention to biker gangs and dispel the myths surrounding them.
“Maybe it’s time for law enforcement and the public to take off their blinders and recognize these criminals for what they are,” he said: “criminals.”
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Gang Bandidos territory
Despite their worldwide expansion, the Bandidos’ influence is first and foremost felt in their home region of Texas. Although the Texas landscape has changed since the club was founded, it remains a place where the Bandidos feel at home and can operate freely. 🏴☠️
The Bandidos’ leader’s goal is to have chapters in every city in the United States. As a result, the gangs have continued to grow at a breakneck pace. Several new leaders have taken command of clubs formed in different cities. And the stated aim is sometimes quite explicit: “world domination”!
- First Australian clan
The first Australian clan was of great importance to the Bandidos. It represented both a means of going further than ever before and establishing their influence on a whole new continent. Only a handful of Western motorcycle clubs can boast such influence in Australia. The Bandidos, for example, look set to become as famous as Hell’s Angels. 😎
- International Rules
Do ideas change when you change continents? Of course not. Clubs share exactly the same values and passion, and are proud to belong to their respective groups. It’s only the activities that differ, because obviously not everyone wants to be involved in the drug trade… What remains today is above all the desire to live their passion for motorcycles to the full!
- Being part of the “Big 3”
Many consider the Bandidos to be one of the top three motorcycle clubs in the world. Although they appear to be less dominant and extensive than Hell’s Angels, they’re not afraid to aim to be part of the “Big 3” – the three most renowned clubs in the world.
Here today are the 7 biggest biker clubs: the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws, the Pagans, the Mongols, the Vagos, the Sons of Silence and, of course, the Bandidos.
Surprising facts about MC Bandidos
These days, there are a multitude of motorcycle clubs, and it seems that every city in the United States has several. Historically, however, only about a dozen motorcycle clubs remain etched in memory and in motorcycle culture. Let’s take a look at what distinguishes Bandidos from the rest :
- Quebec’s biker wars
Times have changed, but the rivalry between the Bandidos and the Hells Angels endures. Thus, in the 90s and 2000s, confrontations multiplied, until they reached Quebec. The number of victims exceeded a hundred each year. The war ended when eight members of the Bandidos were found dead on a farm. 😵
A former policeman convicted of the murders tried to pin the blame on the Bandidos’ president. He claimed that Jeff Pike was the mastermind behind the murders. However, Pike was never charged with the crimes. Instead, the former policeman and five other individuals were heavily convicted.
- Foundation in Texas
The Texas of the 60s was a formidable landscape, but it was also marked by poverty and arid lands. It was in 1966 that the club was founded, even though the founder had no idea what the club would become at the time! Everyone present at the time sensed that something “special” was being born.
- Present in at least 22 countries
The Bandidos motorcycle gang spread at lightning speed, ready to engulf everything in its path. It was present both nationally and internationally, in no fewer than 22 countries. The scope of this motorcycle club testifies to its power and dominance. 💪
- Lost reality
Speaking of “reach”, there’s no denying that the Bandidos are far less famous today than their long-time rivals, Hell’s Angels. Perhaps this is due to all the publicity they’ve received and their out-of-this-world communications. Whatever the case, the Hell’s Angels remain untouchable, even for the Bandidos.
- The many territories
The word “extensive” has come up a lot in this article, and will probably come up again, because nothing is more important for a motorcycle club. The more countries and cities they are present in, the more influence they can have on members of those communities. This exposure creates notoriety and respect. Ultimately, respect is everything for a motorcycle club, as is loyalty. 👊
- The price to pay
With great power comes great responsibility. The Bandidos didn’t get to where they are today by chance. Their domination has been planned, and they must face the consequences. ⚖️ 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
Every member was warned on joining that his or her life would be forever changed by joining the MC. And naturally, the authorities don’t see them as just a bunch of motorcycle-riding youngsters. That’s why every member wearing the MC emblem is monitored and checked by the police.
