The Gang’s All Here

When a beloved brother died last summer, more than four hundred bikers thundered into San Antonio for his funeral. As they swapped stories about the old days and guzzled beer, one message could be heard over the roar of their Harleys: Bandidos forever.

by Skip Hollandsworth

April 2007

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I SAW MY FIRST BANDIDOS IN 1969, when I was eleven years old. My father, a straitlaced Presbyterian minister, took our family to Galveston for a vacation. We were walking in our bathing suits on the sidewalk next to the seawall when a group of them roared past us on the adjoining boulevard, their engines as loud as fighter jets.

“Get down!” my father yelled, as if he thought the Bandidos might shoot us. He ran over and put his arms around one of my sisters, thinking they might kidnap her. “Get down!” he shouted again. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.

For me and my friends, the Bandidos were like the bogeymen. At recess, we swapped stories—perhaps true, perhaps not—about how Bandidos pulled out their enemies’ teeth with pliers and beat them with heavy metal wrenches. We talked about Bandidos carrying bombs with them on their motorcycles, which they used to blow up gas stations that refused to serve them. We even believed that, just for fun, they had sex with dead women.

And as far as we were concerned, the great outlaw of the state was not Sam Bass, John Wesley Hardin, or any of the other nineteenth-century gunslingers mentioned in our textbooks. It was the Bandidos’ founder, Donald Chambers—only he rode a Harley instead of a horse. To this day, I can remember the first time I saw his photo: a mug shot, printed in a newspaper, that had been taken after he had been arrested. He was as lean as a plank, with light brown hair that fell to the bottom of his neck and sideburns that went down to his jaw line, and he stared at the camera with a cocky, you’ll-never-bring-me-down expression.

“He was a hell-raiser, there was no question about that,” said his daughter, Donna Lee Chambers-Miers, who lives near Crockett and used to go barhopping with her father when she was a teenager. “When he started downing shots of Windsor Canadian whiskey, people learned real quick that he was not someone to mess with. God, Daddy was famous for the way he could throw a punch. And if that didn’t work, he’d pull out his knife and start swinging that around too.”

Chambers started the Bandidos in March 1966, when he was 36 years old and working on the ship docks in Houston. In the past, he had been a member of other Houston-area motorcycle clubs, but they had bored him. He told his friends that he was naming his club the Bandidos, in honor of the Mexican bandits who refused to live by anyone’s rules but their own, and he began recruiting his first members not only out of Houston but also out of the biker bars in Corpus Christi, Galveston, and San Antonio.

“Don wasn’t looking for people who fit into what he called ‘polite society,’” said one of Chambers’s first members, Royce Showalter. Showalter, his white hair long and braided, is now sixty years old, living in San Antonio on disability payments and barely able to walk because of past motorcycle accidents. But when I spoke to him, he still smiled brightly at the memory of those early days when Chambers came into his life. “He 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 that era there were already a number of hard-core biker clubs scattered throughout the country, including the Outlaws, the Pagans, and, of course, the Hells Angels, which had been formed shortly after World War II. Those clubs called themselves the One Percenters, a phrase stolen from a former president of the American Motorcyclist Association who once declared, after a rumble between two motorcycle clubs in California, that 99 percent of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens and 1 percent nothing more than “outlaws.” The Hells Angels were particularly notorious: The year Chambers started the Bandidos, soon-to-be-famous journalist Hunter S. Thompson published Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, a book that detailed the club’s violent, drug-fueled adventures.

“All of us read it to get some ideas on what we should be doing,” said Showalter. “And then we looked at one another and said, ‘Hell, we can do a lot better than these guys.’ ”

By the early seventies, Chambers had more than one hundred members, many of whom were restless young Vietnam veterans who, in the words of one Bandido I spoke to, “had gotten bored sitting at home trying to be nice after the government had taught them how to be so bad.” The original Bandidos had wild, unruly hair, scraggly beards, huge tattoos, and cigarettes sticking out of their mouths, and they went by such nicknames as Revolver, Pecker, Deadweight, Rawhide, Coonass, and Crankcase. One member was nicknamed Log Cabin because he loved drinking whiskey from a Log Cabin syrup bottle. Although the club was made up mostly of white males, Chambers welcomed Hispanics, and for a couple of years, there was one black man who rode with the club. His nickname was Spook.

In some ways, oddly, the Bandidos were not all that different from any other fraternal organization. Just like the Rotary Club, each chapter was required to have a weekly meeting where attendance was taken and dues paid. Just like the Lions Club, its members had vests and were given rules about wearing them. (A Bandido was required to wear his vest whenever he rode his motorcycle. Conversely, if he was in a car, he had to take it off.) Like the Elks, the Bandidos had their own clubhouses, and like the Masons, they had their own initiation rites.

But that’s where the comparisons ended. Consider, for instance, the gold-colored “courtesy card” that Chambers printed up for his members to give to “citizens” (the word they used to describe nonmembers). Embossed in red at the top of each card was the Bandidos’ ominous motto: “We are the people our parents warned us about.” In the lower left corner were the initials “FTW” (for “F— the World”). And in the middle of each card was the phrase “Bandido by profession, Biker by trade, Lover by choice, You have just had the honor of meeting …,” which was followed by that particular member’s signature.

Or consider the Bandidos’ initiation rites. Once a new member received his Bandidos vest, he was ordered to lay it on the ground. The other members of his chapter then urinated, vomited, and defecated on it. The new recruit was then required to put the vest back on and dry it out by riding on his motorcycle.

“We were so crazy back then it’s amazing we are alive,” said Showalter. “We’d go flat out on our motorcycles all day long, eighty to ninety miles an hour, and then at night, we’d hold our parties far out in the woods so the cops wouldn’t find us. There was booze and drugs everywhere. We had girls show up who wanted to screw everyone. There was always someone stumbling into the bonfire and someone else shooting a pistol into the air. We’d party till dawn, go to sleep right there on the ground, and then get up, get on our motorcycles, and hit the road again.”

Then, in 1972, Chambers and two other Bandidos were arrested for shooting to death two drug dealers in El Paso over a botched sale. The police said that before killing the dealers, Chambers had made them dig their own graves. Then Chambers and the other Bandidos had set their bodies on fire before burying them.

Chambers was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison, leading some police officials to speculate that the Bandidos, without their founder, would disband. But his right-hand man, Ronnie Hodge, another former Houston dockworker, who was the size of a grizzly bear, took over and did not make the slightest attempt to tone down the Bandidos’ renegade image. Throughout the seventies, they were arrested for dealing drugs, running prostitution rings, extorting money from the owners of roadhouses and strip joints—even operating illegal pit bull fights.

“Yep, we were the bad boys,” said one of the most infamous Bandidos from those years, 63-year-old Franklin “Stubs” Schmick, who now lives in East Texas with his Old Lady of the past fifteen years, Barbara “Dummy” Schmick, a chatty, sassy woman who, during the seventies, was renowned among the Bandidos for her bombshell looks and her extracurricular activities at an Austin nude-modeling studio. “I’ll be honest, it was a lot more fun back then. The police had no cell phones and no video cameras, which meant we all had a much better chance of getting away.”

IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, the Bandidos became suspects in two of the state’s most publicized shootings: the attempted slaying in 1978 of James Kerr, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Antonio who was reportedly conducting an investigation into the club, and the 1979 assassination of U.S. district judge John Wood Jr., of San Antonio, who was known as Maximum John for his merciless sentences for drug offenders, a few of whom were Bandidos.

Kerr identified three Bandidos in a police lineup as his possible assailants. In the Wood case, more than one hundred Bandidos were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. Suddenly, the club found itself in the national spotlight: In Newsweek, they were described as “the single greatest organized crime problem” in Texas, and on ABC’s 20/20, a young Geraldo Rivera noted that seven of the club’s eight national officers had criminal records “involving drugs, guns, or violence.”

Unrepentant, the Bandidos insisted that they had not shot the prosecutor or the judge and that the only reason they were being harassed was because of their anti-establishment posturing. (In the Newsweek article, a defiant Hodge snarled, “We’re the last free Americans.”) And when members of an El Paso crime family, the Chagras, were eventually convicted of hiring hit men to shoot Kerr and Wood—Wood’s killer was Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson—the Bandidos promptly celebrated by throwing huge parties and racing around on their motorcycles, shooting their middle fingers at just about everyone they came across, including cops.

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