Scene: Bikers lay dead by their motorcycles in the parking lot of Twin Peaks Bar and Grill in Waco, Texas, just after midday on Sunday
One gang ‘ambushed the other’ at recruitment event hosted by Twin Peaks Bar and Grill in Waco, Texas
It started as a physical fight and escalated to involve chains, knives and guns
Diners and employees scrambled for shelter in the freezer as more than 100 rounds were fired
8 bikers died at the scene and a 9th in hospital, another 18 bikers were hospitalized, no civilians were injured
Police were monitoring the meeting outside but said owners refused to cooperate with them until shooting started
Twin Peaks insists they had ‘positive communication with the police’. The police said that was nonsense
Police surrounded the place and detained gunmen as fighting spilled out into the parking lot
The gangs’ allies were flocking from across the state to continue confrontation after it ended, police warned
A shootout between three rival biker gangs at a bar in Waco, Texas, on Sunday afternoon left at least nine gang members dead. Eighteen others were taken to the hospital with gunshot and stab wounds, the Associated Press reports.
Shoot out: What started as a physical fight shortly after midday in Twin Peak restaurant rapidly escalated to involve chains, clubs, knives and gunfire, police said. The fight spilled into the parking lot where a SWAT team shot dead at least one biker and surrounded the rest
Texas is an emerging battleground for outlaw motorcycle gangs, said Steve Cook, executive director of the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association. Next month, Cook, who works in law enforcement in Kansas City and worked undercover in a motorcycle gang in the early 2000s, was supposed to travel to Waco to hold a conference for local police.
Waco historically hasn’t been a hot spot for gang rivalries, Cook said. In a 2013 national survey of law enforcement, Texas didn’t show up as an area of intense gang activity. But in an interview Sunday night, Cook said he knew something was coming:
“We were pretty certain that some kind of incident was on the horizon.”
Outlaw motorcycle gangs are a small slice of gang activity in the US
Motorcycle clubs have been accused of lawlessness since at least 1947, when a Fourth of July motorcycle race in Hollister, California, got national attention for drunkenness and disorder and became the inspiration for the 1953 Marlon Brando movie The Wild One.
A biker sits next to what appears to be a covered body after several people were killed during the shoot-out
An enduring pattern was set: motorcycle gangs were both a perceived larger-than-life menace and an object of media fascination. The Hell’s Angels were excoriated by the California attorney general in 1965 and infiltrated by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara says the nine dead were members of the Bandidos or Cossacks gangs.
Violent motorcycle gangs call themselves the “1 percent” â a defiant reference to a (possibly apocryphal) statement from the American Motorcycle Association that 99 percent of motorcyclists are law-abiding.
There are hundreds of motorcycle gangs in the US, but the Department of Justice considers eight national groups to be a serious threat.
Police believe five gangs were involved in the shoot-out which has led to restaurants closing across the city
The gangs, which originated in the US but have spread abroad, are best known for trafficking in drugs and sometimes people.
But they’re a relatively small part of the American gang landscape. A 2013Â survey from the National Gang Intelligence Center found that about 2.5 percent of gang members nationwide are in outlaw motorcycle gangs.
All the same, police consider them to be more threatening than their small numbers might suggest. About 10 percent of jurisdictions said they considered the motorcycle gangs a serious threat.
(National Gang Intelligence Center) – OMG stands for Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.
Cook thinks that law enforcement should be more concerned.
“I think a lot of people just donât take these guys seriously,” he says. “They just look at them and say theyâre bikers and they ride motorcycles and theyâre tattooed and theyâre dirty, and thatâs the end of it.”
The recruitment event was hosted by the restaurant but despite police fears of conflict, management wouldn’t let officers in
But he calls them domestic terrorists.
“They can pretend like theyâre these fraternal organizations,” he said. “I canât tell you the last time the Kiwanis and the Shriners had a shootout at a public venue.”
Based on their leathers, it appears the Pirados, the Veterans (one sitting), and the Leathernecks (one standing, center) were involved
The Department of Justice portrays the gangs as the Mafia on motorcycles, saying they traffic in cocaine, methamphetamine, and prescription drugs: in Indianapolis in 2013, federal agents arrested 42 members of the Outlaws gang on charges that included drug trafficking, extortion, and money laundering.
Witnesses described the scene in the quiet commercial shopping strip as a war zone
Clashes occur when biker gangs fight over territory
A nine-year battle in Canada between rival gangs, known as the Quebec Biker Wars, left 160 people dead. In California in 2010, biker gangs fought over who would control a Starbucks in Santa Cruz, which led to gang members hitting each other with hammers in the parking lot.
Panic: Families scrambled and some hid in the freezer of the diner as more than 100 rounds were fired
Cook said Texas hasn’t historically been a hotspot for this kind of battle â at least, no more than anywhere else. But he said he’d seen signs that a confrontation was coming.
Texas, he said, has historically been controlled by the Bandidos, one of the largest outlaw motorcycle gangs in the US.
By late Sunday afternoon two groups of gunmen were sat unceremoniously on the tarmac at opposite ends of the parking lot
At least five motorcycle gangs comprising 150 members were meeting at the Twin Peaks bar and restaurant in Waco to discuss recruitment. Local officials haven’t yet said which gangs were involved in the shooting.
The Cossacks (pictured at the scene) and the Scimitars were working in alliance
The Cossacks, a local Texas gang, had been challenging the Bandidos’ dominance, including discussing a possible alliance with the Hell’s Angels, a rival of the Bandidos, Cook said.
The biggest provocation came when the Cossacks began wearing a Texas patch on their clothing â “basically a slap in the face to the Bandidos,” said Cook, who says he was an undercover investigator of the Bandidos and some of their support groups.
The Bandidos (file image)
“We knew the tensions with the Cossacks were as high as they’d ever been,” he said. “I donât think anybody could have forecasted it to the degree that it happened.”
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