How the Bandidos became one of the world’s most feared biker gangs

[mahatmakanejeeves]

How the Bandidos became one of the world’s most feared biker gangs

Morning Mix
By Michael E. Miller May 18 at 4:19 AM
@MikeMillerDC

The Bandidos motorcycle gang has a saying: “Cut one, we all bleed.”

It’s not clear who started the cutting, but there was plenty of bloodshed on Sunday when the Bandidos brutally clashed with members of several other bike gangs at a restaurant in Waco, Tex. A wild shootout in broad daylight left nine bikers dead, 18 wounded and at least 165 under arrest.
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The shootout is the latest and perhaps goriest chapter in a long history of violence involving motorcycle gangs in the United States. The Bandidos, like their more popularly known archrivals the Hells Angels, are frequent characters in that blood-soaked book. The group is generally considered the world’s second-largest biker gang, behind the Angels, with as many as 2,500 members in 13 countries, according to the Department of Justice.
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The Bandidos began almost 20 years after the Hells Angels, but the two gangs soon became bitter rivals. According to the motorcycle club’s legend, founder Donald Chambers was bored with other bike clubs. “Chambers started the Bandidos in March 1966, when he was 36 years old and working on the ship docks in Houston,” Skip Hollandsworth wrote in a 2007 profile of the gang. “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.”

[AuntPatsy]

1. There's other things in life I fear more...