Former topless waitress reveals ‘wild years’ in Gypsy Joker bikie underground

In the early 2000s, Melissa had no idea she was stepping into SA’s fiercest bikie culture war – she simply felt she might have found her place in the world.

In early 2000s Adelaide, Melissa wasn’t just a rebellious, androgynous teenager in a conservative city – being an outcast threatened her survival.

Kicked out of home in Year 10, she was alone, afraid and felt like she didn’t belong – wondering what the future, if any, might bring.

Later she would meet her first boyfriend, who suggested stripping. And, she says, her world started to open up.

“You had all walks of life come into the venue,” she said.

“But the bikies had the most freedom. They were chill, nice guys. They stopped all the bullshit.”

Back then parts of Hindley Street pulsed with motorbike engines, chrome glinting under neon. On some weekends, more than 100 fully patched bikies gathered, cracking beers, booming with laughter.

WATCH ALL THREE SECRETS OF THE MISSING JOKER EPISODES

A pole dancer at an Adelaide nightclub.

Mike Rann talked tough on bikies and ultimately prevailed.

Melissa had no idea she was stepping into South Australia’s fiercest culture war – she simply felt she might have found her place in the world.

But the battle was on.

In one corner, Steve Williams – towering at six-foot-three, ponytail, crystalline eyes – was nicknamed “Horrible” for his work as a debt collector.

The public face of Adelaide’s bikie scene, he became the Gypsy Jokers SA chapter president in his late 30s.

In 2001, ‘Horrible’ left a police officer with a broken jaw at an all-in bikies versus cops brawl at Beachport.

He was elected in defiance against the police and as symbolic push back against a government that wanted to legislate the clubs out of existence.

In the other corner: Premier Mike Rann, a centrist Labor premier, socially progressive but tough on crime.

Elected in 2002, Rann said he wanted to rid the state of bikies.

Rann, too, knew something about rising to the top by force of personality and described bikies as “meatheads on motorbikes” and “scum” who were “terrorising the public”.

Then SA police officer Assistant Commissioner John White at press conference in January 2001 after the Beachport brawl.

A year later the state government said it intended to fully bulldoze bikie clubhouses.

The state’s anti-gang taskforce was pumped with fresh resources and went on the attack.

Williams countered with a charm offensive – he opened clubhouse doors to the media, invited MPs.

He claimed the Jokers were “everyday blokes”.

Some say the publicity did the movement some good, making it all seem exciting, hip even.

As it happened, Melissa had moved on from stripping to topless waitressing at the Wingfield clubhouse.

“It was almost boring,” she said.

SA brothel madam Stormy Summers at her Waymouth Street brothel.

“They were older, laid-back. Most nights they’d just talk about current affairs.”

But then, the cracks appeared.

Williams, under pressure, was stood down from the presidency suffering poor mental health with psychotic breaks.

He moved into a small flat across from Stormy Summers’ boudoir.

It was around this time Stormy employed Melissa as a sex worker.

“We always felt safe when Steve was around,” Melissa said.

“He just seemed so caring. He remembered everyone’s name, asked how your kid’s birthday went, how your exams were. Little things like that.”

Members of the Police Water Response team search a water canal looking for Williams’ remains.

But by early 2005, Melissa felt something shifting. The world that once felt like refuge now seemed fragile. She moved to Melbourne.

Not long after, she heard Williams had been murdered after attending some kind of meeting at Gepps Cross Hotel on June 14, 2005.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “He held such high standing — like with Bikers Against Child Abuse, where he brought different clubs together. He was a unifier.”

Williams’ murder has never been solved. Conspiracies swirl: was it bikies?

Gypsy Joker biker Steve Williams.

Journalist Adam Shand, who covered the case, said Williams walked a dangerous line between counterculture and criminality.

“For a lot of misfits, Steve and Stormy had created more of an underground community than an underworld,” Shand said.

“You’ve got this very high level society, lawyers, doctors, judges, and so forth, and then you’ve got a big gap down the people like Steve and his cohort. And they felt excluded, you felt like the system never gave them a chance.

Author and journalist Adam Shand said Gypsy Joker Steve Williams had a lot of enemies.

“But Steve had a lot of enemies. Without a body, without a clue, it’s really hard to speculate.”

Separately by 2008, Rann riding on the back of a crushing 2006 election victory would usher in the country’s, perhaps even the world’s, harshest anti-bikie laws.

Stormy would be evicted from the Waymouth street brothel.

The rebellion had been crushed.

Melissa says some of the people for those heady days in Adelaide in the 2000s are “still some of the closest friends”.

“What I have always believed,” she said of Williams’ disappearance, “was that he was saying things and someone wanted to shut him up”.

Note: The Advertiser reporter Luke Williams is not related to Steve Williams.

Originally published as Former topless waitress reveals ‘wild years’ in Gypsy Joker bikie underground