WaPo | Richie was the first to die, then Diesel, then Dog.
Whatever
else they were in life, the men with the biker nicknames were Cossacks,
loud and proud and riders in a Texas motorcycle gang. And that’s what
got them killed, shot to death in a brawl with a rival gang in the
parking lot of a Texas “breastaurant” that advertised hot waitresses and
cold beer.
“I saw the first three of our
guys fall, and we started running,” said their brother in arms, another
Cossack, who said he was there May 17 when the shooting started at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Nine bikers died, 18 were wounded and more than 170 landed in jail.
The
Cossack, president of a North Texas chapter of the motorcycle gang,
asked not to be identified because he is now in hiding and said he fears
for his life. He is a rare eyewitness speaking publicly about the Waco
massacre, one of the worst eruptions of biker-gang violence in U.S.
history.
The bulletin warns that Bandidos who serve in
the U.S. military may be “supplying the gang with grenades and C4
explosives” to target officials and their families with car bombs, the
network reported.
A spokesman for the Waco
police, Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, said police had received an increasing
number of threats in recent days. “We are taking the necessary
precautions,” he said.
U.S. military ties
to the Bandidos and other biker gangs were detailed in a U.S. Justice
Department report published last year that concluded the gangs were
using “active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense
(DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the
United States.”
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives study, first reported by the Intercept,
concludes that biker gangs have recruited scores of employees of
federal, state and local governments, police and firefighters, National
Guardsmen and reservists, some of them with government security
clearances, to help them “maim and murder” in support of their
“insatiable appetite for dominance.”
