He said he was unarmed and hadn’t come to fight that day.īy his account, the Bandido biker "deliberately ran into" the Cossack prospect, hitting him hard enough to "knock him down." He described the prospect as "an older guy" with a leg brace who "certainly wasn’t a threat to anybody." Wilson, who owns a Waco bike shop, Legends Cycles, spoke on camera with CNN. "The lead guy, I looked out - I was watching - he deliberately steered into one of our prospects and hit him," said John Wilson, president of the Waco-area chapter of the Cossacks. Several witnesses insist that a high-ranking Bandido, backing his motorcycle into a parking space, struck a Cossack "prospect." Harsh words were exchanged as the Bandidos rolled up to the restaurant to find a line of Cossack bikes already parked out front. Now they’re wondering if they were set up. They told police the Cossacks crashed the meeting, according to the incident report.īut many Cossacks and their supporters said they were invited to the meeting and told it had been called to broker peace. The Bandidos had reserved the patio of the Twin Peaks restaurant for a meeting to discuss club business. The witness accounts vary widely, depending on who’s talking and what his or her club alliances might be. A review of the voluminous police file raises some troubling questions and intriguing theories. It’s difficult to know for certain who started the mayhem on May 17. "The majority of the Bandidos took cover, and all involvement in the altercation by members of the Bandidos was in self-defense." "Members of the Bandidos 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 club stated in its news release. They accused police of mishandling the confrontation and giving the public "a false narrative." The Bandidos denied any wrongdoing in a news release after the gunfight. They scoff at the notion that they are gangs in disguise. That label is derived from a quote that may be apocryphal but is part of biker lore that dates back to the 1960s: Someone supposedly said that 99% of bikers are law-abiding citizens, leaving the mayhem to the other one percent.īoth clubs deny they are involved in criminal activities such as drug distribution. Law enforcement officials call them outlaw biker clubs, among the "one-percenters." Now, they’re considered an upstart, with about 800 members and, according to police, a strong desire to beef up their presence in their home state of Texas.Īlthough the bikers insist their clubs are social, even philanthropic organizations, police see both as criminal gangs. The Cossacks formed a few years later but kept a low profile. They have a national presence, particularly in Southern states. The Bandidos, formed in Houston in 1966, are the oldest, largest and most powerful motorcycle group in Texas with more than 2,000 members, according to the Department of Justice. The oldest club in Texas versus the upstarts They also show that tension had been building for months between the two motorcycle clubs. These begin to tell the story of how a midday gunfight turned the parking lot of a Waco strip mall into a battle zone. Police and prosecutors are silenced by a gag order a grand jury is weighing charges in the case.īut against a backdrop of official silence, CNN has obtained thousands of pages of documents - including police intelligence reports, crime scene photos and witness interviews - as well as surveillance video. More than five months later, no one has been charged in the deaths of the nine bikers.
All were jailed on $1 million bail each and charged with engaging in organized crime activity. Some 177 bikers were arrested - so many that they were taken to the Waco Convention Center and held for processing in separate rooms: one for members of the club known as the Bandidos and the other for their rivals, the Cossacks. In all, police recovered 480 weapons: 151 guns, along with assorted knives, brass knuckles, batons, hammers, and the bikers’ blunt objects of choice - padlocks wrapped in bandanas. SWAT team officers drove a pickup truck to the crime scene "so we could pile the firearms in the bed to try to keep suspects from moving over the top of them," Holt noted in his report. "I asked anybody who had a gun to raise their hand," Waco Officer Ryan Holt wrote in a police report obtained by CNN.Īs Holt and his fellow officers disarmed the injured bikers, so many guns piled up on the ground that they literally got in the way.