Bikie shooting at Tugun Seahawks Rugby League Club in 1996
SHE jumped in the car to flee the scene of a double shooting but then the bikies turned on her. Next thing TV reporter Joanne Shoebridge knew a man with a knife was on top of her car.
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“BANG! Bang! They fell on the spot.”
That was how a shocked and frightened witness described the first outbreak of serious bikie violence on the Gold Coast.
It erupted long before the infamous 2013 Broadbeach bikie brawl which sparked Campbell Newman’s controversial VLAD laws. Long before even the 2006 ‘Ballroom Blitz’, when Hells Angels and Finks gang rivals fought a pitched battle in the ballroom of the five-star Royal Pines Resort with guns, knives and chairs.
The year was 1996 and the setting was a suburban footy ground.
The trigger? Anger over a woman.
It was a balmy November Saturday and about 500 people were gathered at the Tugun Seahawks Rugby League Club for a custom motorcycle exhibition.
Soon, two bikies were laying shot and bleeding on the turf as the gunman fled on his Harley Davidson, and a terrified female TV reporter was chased from the scene for 4km by knife-wielding, car-stomping bikies in a scene she described as being straight out of Mad Max.
It was just before 2pm on November 9, 1996, when all hell broke loose at the Seahawks ground.
“I saw it all unfold as if it was in slow motion,” one witness, too scared to be named, told The Sunday Mail at the time.
“A group of Black Uhlans (bikies) were congregating in one spot. I saw this guy – we will refer to him as the shooter – sitting on the ground with his girlfriend.
“One of the Uhlans had walked away from the shooter with a bloodied fist. It appeared as if there had been some sort of confrontation and he had punched the shooter.
“He walked off and joined his mates. He had a can of beer in his other hand.
“I thought this seemed a bit strange so I kept an eye on them. This guy (the punching victim) had not put up any defence. He just sat there for about five minutes. He seemed stunned. He then got up with his girlfriend and went to the kiosk.”
The man grabbed his jacket and appeared to be leaving when he was approached by two ‘very menacing’ Black Uhlans.
“I could see what was going to happen - they were going to have another go at him,’ the witness recounted.
“One of these guys is well-known. He is the bodybuilder sort, 6ft 2or 3. The shooter was much shorter, about 5ft 8 or 9.
“He could see them coming. He said: ‘Get away from me, get away from me’.
“I saw him put his hand into a sack bag he was carrying. He brought out his gun. Bang! Bang! They fell on the spot.
“One of the shooter’s friends yelled at him: ‘Just go!’ He walked over to the custom bike area, got on a bike with his girlfriend and took off.”
One of the victims appeared to be dead. A bullet had gone through his stomach and out his back.
Armed police wearing flak jackets set up roadblocks around the Boyd St football ground.
Chaos erupted when media crews turned up, with enraged bikies attacking cameramen and ripping tape from their video cameras.
Bikies threatened to kill anyone who tried to enter the club and police issued a warning to news crews to get out ‘for their own safety’.
Channel 9 reporter Jo Shoebridge was attacked by a carload of bikies as she fled the scene of the double shooting.
She was chased 4km along the Gold Coast Highway before being forced to stop at a red light, where a knife-wielding man jumped onto the bonnet of her van.
He screamed at her to get out of the car, repeatedly punched the windscreen and smashed the vehicle’s driver’s side mirror. A terrified Shoebridge crashed into the back of a bus as she tried to flee.
“It went on for what seemed like minutes,” she told The Sunday Mail at the time.
“I was very scared. All I could see was this huge man with a knife raised up screaming at me to ‘Get out of the (expletive) car’. It was like a scene out of Mad Max.
“I would hate to think what would have happened if he had managed to get in.”
A witness in the bus that Shoebridge crashed into told police she had seen a gun drawn from the back seat of the bikies’ Holden Commodore.
Channel 7 reporter Sky Kinninmont was also chased by the bikies but managed to outpace them.
The Sunday Mail journalist Chris Taylor entered the leagues club to see his photographer Mick Toal surrounded by five bikies.
“These guys meant business,” Taylor said.
“I said to them that we did not want any hassles, we only wanted to do our job.
“I asked where the other news crews were. One guy said to me: ‘We have just killed them and thrown them over the back fence – do you want the same to happen to you?’
“I said I did not want to aggravate them. He screamed at me: ‘Get the expletive) out of here or I’ll (expletive) kill you’. The message was very clear.”
Both of the victims, Black Uhlans bikies Richard McKenna and Steve ‘Bam Bam’ Zaicov, both 33, had been shot in the stomach.
Zaicov, a bodybuilder and nightclub bouncer, would never walk again after a bullet also hit his spinal chord.
Two days after the shooting, Black Uhlans associate Sean Patrick Jones, 30, handed himself in to Southport police station. He was charged with two counts of attempted murder and possession of a concealable weapon.
At his Brisbane Supreme Court trial a year later, where Jones pleaded not guilty, the jury heard a domestic dispute had sparked the shooting.
Crown prosecutor David Meredith told the court that McKenna had been in a relationship with Jones’ former de facto and Jones wasn’t happy. Adding to the volatility, Jones and his ex were also involved in a Family Court dispute.
At the bike show, Meredith said McKenna and Zaicov spotted Jones and called him a ‘dog’.
But the prosecutor said the Crown would contend that neither McKenna nor Zaicov threatened Jones in a way that justified him shooting them.
Meredith argued there could be no case for self-defence because Jones had threatened McKenna and sought a gun on the morning of the shooting.
Jones was found guilty of grievous bodily harm rather than attempted murder and sentenced to five years’ jail.
Zaicov and McKenna were later awarded a total of $65,625 in criminal damages. It was half of what they were entitled to after Judge Brian Ambrose found they were responsible for 50 per cent of their own injuries because they had approached Jones and threatened to kill him.
“Having regard to their size and experience in physical conflict, they had a present ability to commence to carry out their threat within a couple of seconds,” the judge found.
At the criminal compensation hearing, explosive details emerged of an affidavit sworn by Jones which accused McKenna of criminal activities.
The affidavit was allegedly tabled at a Black Uhlans club meeting which resolved to bankroll a $100,000 contract to have Jones ‘killed or seriously injured’.
McKenna and Zaicov denied this.
Speaking at the time, the Black Uhlans’ then-Queensland president Wally Wallace said the shootings were not part of any gang feud.
“The shootings were a random incident that had no bearings on particular bikie gangs,” he said.
“They could have happened anywhere … at a shopping mall or at the beach.”
Originally published as Bikie shooting at Tugun Seahawks Rugby League Club in 1996
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