The two Bandidos were charged with aggravated assault in March 2014. Curtis Jack Lewis, president of the Abilene chapter of the Bandidos, and Wesley Dale Mason, the chapters’ sergeant at arms, were accused of stabbing two Cossacks outside Logan’s Roadhouse in Abilene in November 2013. The fight resulted from a long simmering dispute between members of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club and the Cossacks and the Scimitars Motorcycle Clubs. The AgingRebel site, however, went into great detail on who was involved: They point to surveillance video showing one Cossack with a gun drawn, and two witnesses who say Cossacks shot first.Ī statement from Stephen Stubbs, a lawyer who had been acting as a spokesman for the Bandidos soon after the incident, says group members "were not aggressors, did not start the altercation, did not strike first, were not the first to pull weapons, and were not the first to use weapons." The statement also accuses the Waco Police Department of creating a "false narrative" of the incident.The Waco police have refused to name the biker groups involved, saying that they did not want to give the gangs publicity. The Cossacks say they're the victims in this situation, but the Bandidos say this isn't true. "It was myself and a couple of other brothers laying on the ground, and I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh, my God, I'm going to die here.' " "I hit the ground right where I was," he says. Luther says there were maybe two more pistol shots followed by a barrage of rifle fire. "I saw another one of our Cossacks step up, and I heard the first gunshot." "I couldn't see exactly what he hit him with, but he hit him with an object upside the head," Luther says. Luther says there was a lot of yelling before a Bandido hit a Cossack. A police spokesman at the time said the same thing. He and several other members were sitting on the patio of the Twin Peaks restaurant when, he says, a Bandido ran over a Cossack prospect's foot in the parking lot. (Kelly McEvers/NPR)Ĭossacks member Richard Luther says a Bandido started the skirmish. Photos on the wall of a bar memorialize the seven members of the Cossacks Motorcycle Club who were killed in the Waco shootout last May. The Cossack leader says the Waco chapters of the two biker groups decided to sit down and try to work it out - a claim the Bandidos deny - on May 17, 2015, a Sunday. In an incident in March 2015, the indictment alleges, one Cossack was struck on the head "multiple times with a claw hammer, causing serious injury." The two groups began to fight in other parts of Texas. One Cossack leader, who did not want to be named because of the ongoing investigation into Waco, says the group informed the Bandidos the Cossacks were going to wear the patch.Ĭourt documents allege John Portillo, then the national vice president of the Bandidos, declared the group was "at war" with the Cossacks beginning in 2013 and continuing through 2015. #Cossacks mc waco PatchAccording to the federal indictment, the Bandidos didn't want the Cossacks wearing the patch without the group's permission.īut some Cossacks say that about a year before the shootout, they had started to wear the Texas bottom rocker. The patch is worn on the back of a member's vest, and it establishes the organization's territory. Some members of the Cossacks say the fight began over a patch: the Texas bottom rocker. On this episode of Embedded, Kelly McEvers tries to find out what led to the shootout in Waco. The Cossacks, the smaller of the two groups, have also been identified by the Texas Department of Public Safety as an "emerging outlaw motorcycle gang." Both groups deny being gangs or being involved in illegal activities. District Court in San Antonio calls the Bandidos "a highly organized criminal organization" and charges three of the group's leaders with "racketeering activity," including murder, drug trafficking and extortion. The two biker groups have been around since the 1960s. 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. Authorities investigate the shooting in the parking lot of the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas.
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