Police arrested nearly 200 people on charges of engaging in organized criminal activity. The deadly shootout between the Bandidos Motorcycle Club and the Cossacks Motorcycle Club in Waco, Texas, in May 2015 raised questions about the groups involved.Īt the end of the shootout, 20 people were injured, and seven members of the Cossacks, one member of the Bandidos and one biker not affiliated with either group were dead. The cause of the disturbance is still not clear, but it could have been a parking dispute, a biker getting his foot run over, or both, Swanton said.Authorities investigate the shooting in the parking lot of the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. "When those individuals showed up, there was a disturbance in the parking lot," Swanton said. Swanton said Tuesday that the coalition of clubs had reserved an outdoor bar area for the meeting, and that another group that wasn't invited, which Swanton declined to identify, showed up anyway. The Confederacy of Clubs, a network of motorcycle clubs, had a scheduled regional meeting at the restaurant, according to their website. Patrick Swanton has repeatedly declined to identify which gangs were involved in a fight that began with punches then grew to include chains, knives and then guns.įive gangs from across Texas had gathered at Twin Peaks to in part settle differences over turf, Swanton has said. McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara, whose office is involved in the investigation, said the nine dead were members of the Bandidos and Cossacks. Waco, Texas, police Sergeant Patrick Swanton. The only thing unusual about the Waco confrontation was that it happened in public.
Katz said bikers maim and kill each other all the time. Terry Katz, former commander of the Maryland State Police's organized crime section, said Don Chambers, founder of the Bandidos gang, modeled his club's emblem - a sombrero-wearing Mexican caricature carrying a sword and pistol - after the corn chip company's Frito Bandito mascot.
According to the report, the Bandidos are involved in transporting and distributing cocaine and marijuana and in the production and distribution of methamphetamine. law enforcement authorities," the Justice Department said in a report on outlaw motorcycle gangs. The Bandidos "constitute a growing criminal threat to the U.S. Fort Worth police said the victims were known members of a criminal motorcycle gang. Last March, two members of the Bandidos were indicted in connection with the stabbing of two Cossacks at an Abilene steakhouse in March 2014.Īnd in December, three Bandidos were arrested for a shooting at a Fort Worth motorcycle bar that left one dead and two others wounded. Some 170 bikers are being held in a Waco, Tex. The May 1 law enforcement bulletin said the FBI had received information that Bandidos had discussed "going to war with Cossacks." It also outlined several recent incidents between the two groups, including one instance in March when about 10 Cossacks forced a Bandido to pull over along Interstate 35 near Waco and attacked him with "chains, batons and metal pipes before stealing his motorcycle," WFAA reported. In Texas, Edwards said the Cossacks have only one smaller club who claim allegiance - the Scimitars, another group involved in the shootout. The Bandidos, however, have stronger grassroots support with more smaller clubs who claim allegiance to them, according to Edwards.
The Cossacks have about 200 members in the state and the Bandidos have 150 to 175, he said. "That was saying, we're not going to be taking direction from you - we're going to be standing on our own two feet," Edwards said. The move to wear the "bottom rocker" by the Cossacks is not entirely unexpected, however, he said - though the Bandidos are a much larger club nationally and internationally, the two clubs are on more even footing in Texas.
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Stronger motorcycle clubs sometimes threaten to take the "bottom rocker" patch off the backs of weaker clubs as a sign of humiliation. The patch is the bottom of three worn on the backs of those in motorcycle clubs, and it's taken very seriously in biker culture, according to Edwards. "They'd have to know they'd get a strong response." "For them to do something like this, to know how much it would enrage the Bandidos, it's really provocative," said Edwards, who has researched and written extensively on the Bandidos and biker culture. Though the Cossacks have been in Texas since 1969, they didn't claim Texas as their territory on the patch known as a "bottom rocker" until last year, according to Peter Edwards, a Toronto star reporter and author of "The Bandido Massacre: A Story of Bikers, Brotherhood and Betrayal," a book about the 2006 slaying of eight Canadian members of the Bandidos.