How bikie Shane Bowden’s life of crime ended in a hail of bullets
When Shane Bowden walked from prison in June, a convoy of Harley Davidsons and a stretch limousine escorted him back to Melbourne. Months later he was lying dead in his driveway after an execution-style shooting. How did it go so bad so quickly for the bikie kingpin?
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The countdown clock on outlaw bikie Shane Bowden’s life began as the stretch limousine waited outside jail to take him home.
Bowden’s Mongol bikie “brothers’’ including club president Toby Mitchell – who has been at the helm of the club for about a year – arrived to greet him as he walked out of Loddon Prison’s gates.
The club had backed their man during his incarceration via their Brothers Behind Bars support program, and the limo was an extravagant touch to welcome him back.
With a convoy of bikies on Harley Davidsons escorting the 47-year-old back to Melbourne from the regional jail near Castlemaine, he was gifted a hotel suite and celebrated in style that night after five years on the inside.
That was in mid June.
By July 1 he was being pelted with bullets in his Epping driveway.
It took just 15 days for Bowden to be shot and kicked out of the Mongols in “bad standing’’.
The Herald Sun understands Bowden had been speaking with another Mongol when shots were fired into his driveway from a car, hitting him in the lower body.
Insiders say the Mongols have distanced themselves from the Epping attack and any infighting.
“Whatever happened to him, happened to him, but it’s his own demons from the past,’’ one observer said.
Police don’t necessarily agree.
Little more than three months later, having been shot once, he was executed in another ambush shooting in his new driveway.
This time it was on the Gold Coast after fleeing Victoria in fear for his life.
Bowden, a junior cycling champion who was accepted to the Australian Institute of Sport, could not rely on hopping borders to hide.
He had discharged himself from hospital soon after the July attack on him in Epping, paranoid he was being watched and vulnerable to another attempt on his life.
Two gunmen, who are still to be identified, remain at large.
A motive for the attack remains under investigation, but it is not uncommon for fallouts to occur when senior bikie members, such as Bowden, return to the fold after prison stints.
During his imprisonment, high ranking members close to Bowden were exiled from the club in New South Wales and Queensland.
Among those was NSW-based national Mongols president Mark ‘’Ferret’’ Moroney.
Bowden was believed to have been upset at Victorian members who played a role in his departure.
There has also been speculation Bowden was re-establishing his links with his former club, the Finks.
Other senior underworld figures may have also had issues with Bowden.
But if Bowden was hoping to return to Queensland quietly, he failed.
The veteran bikie caused national headlines when he was nabbed at Brisbane Airport in September after fleeing Victoria.
It was initially believed he was COVID-19 positive and may have infected more than 80 passengers on the flight.
Queensland authorities knew him well.
In 2006, Bowden was part of a wild brawl which erupted at a kickboxing tournament at the Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast between Finks and Hells Angels gang members.
The violence began after Christopher Wayne Hudson was spotted at the event following his defection to the rival Hells Angels.
Bowden, then a Fink, produced a handgun and fired at Hudson, hitting him in the face.
It became known as the “Ballroom Blitz’’.
Bowden, who was on parole at the time for drug trafficking and property offences, was convicted and went back to prison for seven years.
As a key figure within the Finks he was a member of its “Terror Team” whose motto states “violence with attitude’’.
A judge would declare Bowden a “serious violent offender’’ whose crimes included a 1998 assault of a woman outside a nightclub.
The year following the “Ballroom Blitz’’ Hudson, fuelled on ice, would shoot three people in Melbourne’s CBD.
Bowden’s time as an infamous Fink ended when the club was involved in nationwide “patching over” to the international Mongols gang in 2013.
Bowden became a major plank in the Mongols’ Melbourne push as a known enforcer.
As the club’s national Sergeant at Arms, he came to Victoria with another prominent member, Greg Keating, as it established its roots in a Port Melbourne factory and began recruiting.
But it wasn’t long before Victoria Police’s Echo task force was disrupting Bowden’s activities.
The Herald Sun revealed Bowden had moved to Victorian in November 2013, when Bowden was the subject of a raid by Victoria Police’s special operations group.
As heavily armed police surrounded a Port Melbourne warehouse where he was staying an officer called out on a megaphone: “Shane Bowden, come out with your hands up”.
By 2015, Bowden’s decisions became erratic and he was arrested over a violent aggravated burglary in South Yarra.
Bowden, dressed in camouflage, burst into the property wearing night vision goggles and brandishing a knife along with his accomplice, fitness model Janet ‘Aysen’ Campbell.
He attacked two people inside the home, kicking one victim in the head and stomped on his face before taking cash from him.
While in maximum security Port Phillip Prison he charmed a female guard, whose raunchy photos were found in his cell in 2017 by Corrections Victoria staff.
The officer in the images was suspended and later resigned.
A couple of years earlier, in-between prison stints as a ‘’professional’’ outlaw bikie, Bowden posted pictures of himself on social media sipping champagne with his glamorous fiancée flying business class.
In another picture, Bowden is standing with Mitchell.
In it he is wearing a Mongol top with the words ‘‘Respect Few, Fear None’’ emblazoned on it.
That credo would come back to bite him.
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