What happens when two of Australia’s most violent motorcycle gangs decide the same territory isn’t big enough for both of them?
When the promise of brotherhood collides with the reality of bullets and the Gold Coast glittering skyline becomes the backdrop for a war that could tear Queensland’s criminal underworld apart.
October 12, 2020.
Pimpa, Gold Coast.
The sound of automatic gunfire shatters the quiet evening as 21 bullets rip through Shane Bowen’s BMW, turning a simple drive into his own driveway into an execution that would trigger the most dangerous turf war in Queensland’s recent history.
But this wasn’t just another bikey killing.
This was the opening shot in a conflict that would pit the international Mongols Motorcycle Club against the expanding Commonro Empire.
A war that threatens to spill blood across Southeast Queensland and reshape the power structure of Australia’s outlaw motorcycle underworld forever.
The signs of war are everywhere.
Firebombings in Winderoo, brutal bashings at shopping centers, driveby shootings that send families diving for cover, GPS tracking devices attached to cars like digital death sentences.
The weapons are getting deadlier, the surveillance more sophisticated, and the violence more calculated.
But this isn’t just gang warfare.
This is a battle for the future of organized crime in one of Australia’s most lucrative territories.
Southeast Queensland with its ports, tourist dollars, and drug markets worth hundreds of millions, has become the prize that two international criminal organizations are willing to kill for.
On one side, the Mongols, an American-born organization that patched over much of the Finins membership in 2013, creating one of the most powerful bikey alliances in Australian history.
On the other, the Common Cherros, Australia’s most feared organized crime outfit, expanding north from their Sydney stronghold with dreams of total domination.
Between them stands a territory soaked in blood, marked by execution style killings, and divided by invisible lines that shift with every act of violence.
This is the story of how Brisbane became a battleground, how old alliances crumbled into new hatreds, and why the war that’s coming might be unlike anything Australia has ever seen.
Because when bikey warfare looms, everyone becomes a target.
And in Queensland, that war isn’t coming.
It’s already here.
Chapter 1.
The Mongols march north.
To understand the brewing war, we need to go back to 2013 when Queensland’s criminal landscape changed forever.
The Mongols Motorcycle Club, founded in California and built on the recruitment of Hispanic veterans, made a move that would reshape Australian organized crime.
In October 2013, a deal was brokered to patch over the ahead of a proposed ban on the under anti-gang legislation in Queensland.
An estimated 90% of the Fin members joined the Mongols.
The Patchover wasn’t just a merger, it was a conquest.
The Mongols Patchover of the Finins was the largest ever motorcycle club amalgamation in Australia and made the club one of the most powerful bite gangs in the country with a membership of around 400 and chapters in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia.
But with power came problems.
The Mongols weren’t just absorbing territory.
They were inheriting enemies, rivalries, and debts that stretched back decades in Queensland’s criminal underworld.
Former Finins members brought their disputes with them, and new tensions emerged as the American-born Mongols tried to assert control over Australian criminal networks.
The club is designated an outlaw motorcycle gang, OMCG, by the Australian Federal Police.
But designation is one thing.
Reality on the ground was another.
The Mongols found themselves controlling some of Queensland’s most lucrative criminal territories.
But they also found themselves at war with rivals who refused to accept the new order.
The first major test of Mongols power came through Shane Bowden, a man whose life and death would define the trajectory of Queensland’s Bikey Wars for years to come.
Bowden had patched over to the Mongols from the in 2013, but was expelled from the club in bad standing for bashing a fellow member and rejoined the shortly before his death.
Bowden’s defection back to the wasn’t just personal, it was political.
The Mongols were reportedly concerned by Bowden’s recruitment of new members into the police theorized that he was killed over a dispute between the clubs.
The killing of Shane Bowden would prove to be more than just another execution.
It would be the match that lit a fuse, leading to the most sustained period of bikey violence in Queensland’s recent history.
Chapter 2.
Blood in the driveway.
October 12th, 2020.
6:30 p.m.
Pimpa, Gold Coast.
Shane Bowden pulled into the driveway of his unit complex, probably thinking about dinner, maybe planning his evening.
He had no idea that for weeks members of the Mongols had been tracking his every movement, installing GPS devices on his car and planning an execution with military precision.
Following the 12 October 2020 assassination of senior finicky Shane Bowden in Pimpa, police visited all known Mongols members on the Gold Coast seeking information on Bowden’s killing.
The word assassination wasn’t hyperbole.
This wasn’t a spur-ofthe- moment shooting or a drug deal gone wrong.
This was a carefully planned execution carried out by an organization that had decided Shane Bowden represented a threat that could only be eliminated with violence.
Days later, Bowden was in the same vehicle when he was shot 21 times by two hooded gunmen in the driveway of his Gold Coast home.
A court has heard.
Police found the tracking device underneath the black BMW after Bowden was found dead in the driver’s seat with the engine still running.
21 bullets.
The number is staggering and speaks to a level of overkill that goes beyond simple murder into the realm of sending a message.
The killers weren’t just ending Shane Bowden’s life.
They were making a statement about what happened to those who crossed the Mongols.
CCTV from Bowden’s unit complex at Pimpana shows him driving into a garage unit last October as two offenders trailed from behind.
The two offenders, one carrying a long firearm, can be seen running from nearby vacant land and rushing the car as he parked before unloading a flurry of bullets.
The footage reveals the cold professionalism of the killing.
This wasn’t a crime of passion or a spontaneous act of violence.
The gunmen had positioned themselves strategically, waited for their target, and executed him with the efficiency of trained killers.
A total of 21 rounds were fired at Bowden with 19 from a machine pistol and two from a shotgun before the offenders ran back to a waiting silver commodore and fled.
The weapons used tell their own story.
A machine pistol capable of firing 800 rounds per minute paired with a pumpaction shotgun.
This wasn’t street level gang violence.
This was militarygrade firepower being deployed in suburban Australia by criminal organizations with access to serious weaponry.
The execution of Shane Bowden was meant to end a problem for the Mongols.
Instead, it started a war that would consume southeast Queensland for years to come.
Chapter 3.
The fight back.
The murder of Shane Bowden sent shock waves through Queensland’s criminal underworld, but nowhere more than within the ranks of the Fin, who saw the killing as a declaration of war by their former brothers turned enemies.
A turf war between the Mongols and the Finoutheast Queensland subsequently broke out following Bowden’s death, involving firebombings and bashings.
The response was swift and violent.
The decimated by the 2013 patchover but not destroyed began hitting back at Mongols targets across southeast Queensland with a ferocity that surprised even experienced observers of bikey violence.
On 5th June 2021, a barber shop in Winderoo was targeted in an arson attack.
The attack on a civilian business showed how the conflict was expanding beyond traditional biky targets into the broader community, terrorizing ordinary Queenslanders who found themselves caught in the crossfire.
But the violence was just getting started.
Mongols and bikes were then involved in a brawl at the Australia Fair Shopping Center in Southport on 7 June 2021.
A shopping center brawl in broad daylight represented a new escalation in the conflict.
This wasn’t hidden violence in industrial areas or late night shootings.
This was brazen criminal warfare being conducted in public spaces where families shopped and children played.
Police discovered documents suggesting that chapters of both clubs located between Logan and the Queensland border with New South Wales were acting on attack on site orders following the arrest of a Mongols national level office bearer who was allegedly involved in the Australia Fair brawl.
Attack on sight orders represent the ultimate escalation in bikey warfare.
They mean that members of opposing clubs are to be assaulted or killed whenever and wherever they are encountered regardless of circumstances or collateral damage.
The geographic scope of the orders covering the entire corridor between Logan and the NSW border showed that this wasn’t a localized dispute.
This was a full-scale war encompassing much of southeast Queensland’s most populous and economically important regions.
But as the Mongols and Fininss tore each other apart, a new player was watching from the sidelines, calculating when and how to make their move into Queensland’s increasingly chaotic criminal landscape.
Chapter 4.
Comanche expansion plans.
While the Mongols and Fininss were destroying each other in southeast Queensland, the Comancheros were quietly making their own plans for expansion into what they saw as Australia’s most lucrative untapped criminal territory.
Exclusive, Brisbane is in the sights of the notoriously violent Comancher’s Bikey Gang as it tries to expand its presence in Queensland amid growing tensions between local rival clubs already locked in a turf war.
The Kancherero’s interest in Queensland wasn’t opportunistic.
It was strategic.
Brisbane and the Gold Coast represented drug markets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ports perfect for importation operations, and a criminal landscape weakened by ongoing warfare between existing gangs.
7 News can reveal the Common Cheros are in discussions with members of the Vandido’s Brisbane Centro chapter to patch over several members.
It follows the gang establishing a chapter on the Gold Coast.
The Common Cherrow’s expansion strategy was sophisticated and calculated.
Rather than declaring war on existing gangs, they were recruiting from within, offering better opportunities and stronger international connections to members of established Queensland chapters.
Bicky’s sources told 7 News the talks prompted the Bandidos’s national executive to direct its senior members Australiawide to sever ties last month with its Centro chapter.
The Bandido’s reaction showed the threat that Comanche expansion represented to the existing order.
The prospect of losing an entire chapter to a rival organization was serious enough to prompt a national directive cutting ties with potential defectors.
The Comancheros gang have a bloody history with the 1984 Miler massacre, a violent shootout with longtime rivals Bandidos, which left seven people dead and 28 injured.
The reference to Milper wasn’t just historical context.
It was a warning.
The Common Cherrows had been forged in violence and had never hesitated to use maximum force to achieve their objectives.
Their expansion into Queensland represented a threat that existing gangs would have to confront or submit to.
The move by the Common Cherros comes as police investigate two drive-by shootings at the homes of the rebels on Brisbane’s southern outskirts earlier this year.
The timing of the Common Cherrow’s expansion wasn’t coincidental.
They were moving into Queensland at precisely the moment when existing gangs were weakened by internal conflicts and police investigations, positioning themselves to take advantage of the chaos.
But the commoner weren’t just planning to compete with existing gangs.
They were planning to dominate them.
And that meant war was inevitable.
Chapter 5.
The rebels crumble.
As the Common Cherros planned their Queensland expansion, the state’s criminal landscape was being reshaped by another development that would make their conquest easier, the spectacular collapse of the Rebels Motorcycle Club, once Australia’s largest outlaw motorcycle organization.
The nation’s biggest bikey gang is in disarray after one of the largest mass resignations in Australian underworld history.
Sparked by an interstate civil war, the rebels internal crisis began in Western Australia.
But its effects would be felt across the entire country, including Queensland, where the club’s weakened state would create opportunities for more organized and ruthless competitors.
That audacious move was triggered by a perceived lack of support from Sydney for the Rebels WA chapters during the gang’s recent tit fortat war with the Mongols.
Labrook quit the club he joined 25 years ago after his integrity was questioned by national president Damen Vela.
According to police sources, the rebels Mongols war in Western Australia had created fractures that extended far beyond that state’s borders.
When senior rebels felt abandoned by their national leadership during violent conflicts with the Mongols, it created a crisis of confidence that would ultimately benefit the common cheros.
It is understood the dispute with the rebels east coast hierarchy was the last straw for Labbrook who had been appalled by the lack of support given to members who were jailed during a recent war with the Mongols gang.
The pattern was revealing.
Wherever the Mongols fought other gangs, those gangs emerged weakened and vulnerable to commoner recruitment.
The violence that the Mongols used to expand their territory was inadvertently creating opportunities for their most dangerous rivals.
Several high-profile East Coast rebels had recently defected to the Common Cheros, which gave the locals confidence in the switch.
At least six WA rebels have signed over to the new club.
The defections to the Common Cheros weren’t just individual decisions.
They were part of a broader pattern that showed how the Common Cheros were positioning themselves as the dominant force in Australian organized crime, recruiting the best and most experienced members from rival organizations.
The Common Cherrow Gang is Australia’s most feared organized crime outfit.
The description wasn’t media hyperbole.
It was a recognition of what the Common Cherros had become through years of strategic expansion, sophisticated criminal operations, and ruthless elimination of competitors.
But the Common Cherrow’s expansion into Queensland would put them on a collision course with the Mongols, who had no intention of surrendering territory they had fought to control.
Chapter 6.
Countdown to war.
By 2024, all the pieces were in place for the most significant bikey war in Queensland’s history.
The Mongols controlled much of the Gold Coast through violence and intimidation.
The Common Cheros were expanding from their southern strongholds with superior organization and international connections.
The traditional Queensland gangs were weakened by internal conflicts and defections.
A coordinated bational task force Morpheus.
The operation brought together police, government agencies, and partners from Australia and New Zealand in a synchronized effort yesterday, Thursday, November 28th.
Specialist police conducted 33 search warrants and other disruption activities targeting the commoner’s OMCG.
Law enforcement agencies were taking the threat seriously, conducting coordinated operations designed to disrupt common expansion before it could fully establish itself in Queensland.
But police operations, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t address the underlying territorial disputes that were driving the conflict.
The operation uncovered multiple weapons, a firearm, and ammunition, alongside significant quantities of cash, jewelry, and drugs, including methylampetamine, and cocaine.
Police also located and seized elicit tobacco and vapes with an estimated value of more than $1.5 million.
The seizures revealed the scope of criminal operations at stake in the Queensland expansion.
This wasn’t just about territory or respect.
It was about control of drug trafficking networks worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Meanwhile, tensions are building in a turf war over Beanley, where rival clubs the Bandidos and Rebels have both established chapters.
Police investigating the two drive-by shootings at homes of members of rebels have raided several premises belonging to Bandido members and associates.
The violence was spreading beyond the Mongols conflict to encompass other gangs and other territories.
Beanley, a workingclass suburb south of Brisbane, had become a battleground where multiple gangs were establishing competing chapters and defending them with violence.
On February 26th, the Bethnia home of a rebels bikey was allegedly shot up by Bandido members and or their associates.
Following the shooting, a stolen white Mitsubishi Lancer was set on fire in a nearby church street.
The tactics were becoming standardized.
Drive-by shootings followed by the burning of stolen getaway vehicles.
But the targets were becoming more brazen with gang members’ homes being attacked in residential neighborhoods where innocent families lived nearby.
The stage was set for a conflict that would dwarf previous bikey wars in scope, sophistication, and lethality.
All that was needed was the right spark to ignite the violence that everyone could see coming.
Chapter 7.
The war that’s coming.
Today, Southeast Queensland sits on the edge of a bikey war that threatens to be unlike anything Australia has seen before.
The weapons are deadlier, the surveillance more sophisticated, and the organizations more professional than any previous conflict.
If anything, it’s escalating now because the gangs have become more anonymous.
They are not wearing colors and there is no established clubous.
It’s much harder to identify us.
It will be harder to catch us under the new consorting laws here.
They didn’t work in NSW.
Members are already getting around the laws by using businesses to keep associating with other members they have been warned not to contact.
The former bike said the evolution in criminal tactics means that the coming war will be harder to detect, harder to prevent, and harder to prosecute.
The old model of identifiable gang members wearing patches and operating from obvious clubouses has been replaced by sophisticated criminal networks that blend into legitimate society.
Since the repealing of the anti-bikey laws implemented under the previous Newman government, several gangs are marking their territories as they reestablish strongholds in Queensland.
The legal landscape has created opportunities for criminal expansion that the gangs are exploiting with increasing boldness.
As traditional law enforcement tools are weakened, the gangs are becoming more brazen in their territorial expansion and more willing to use violence to achieve their objectives.
Police discovered documents suggesting that chapters of both clubs located between Logan and the Queensland border with New South Wales were acting on attack on site orders.
The geographic scope of the attack on site orders encompasses some of Queensland’s most populous areas, meaning that the violence when it comes will affect hundreds of thousands of ordinary Queenslanders who have no connection to criminal organizations.
The potential for civilian casualties in a conflict involving militaryra weapons, GPS tracking, and attack on site orders is enormous.
Shopping centers, schools, family homes.
Nowhere will be truly safe when the war begins in earnest.
But perhaps most ominously, both the Mongols and Common Cheros have international connections that could bring resources and reinforcements from overseas criminal organizations, escalating a Queensland conflict into something with national and international implications.
The calm before the storm.
Today, Southeast Queensland sits on the edge of war.
The Mongols won’t surrender territory they claim through violence.
The common cheros see Queensland as their destiny.
Traditional gangs are weakened but desperate enough for unpredictable alliances.
Shane Bowden’s execution started a cycle that demands retribution.
Between these waring factions lies territory worth hundreds of millions, populated by innocent people who will bear the consequences of a war they didn’t choose.
The major players are positioning, recruiting, and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Final words.
The bikey warfare looming over southeast Queensland isn’t a matter of if, it’s when.
The gangs are better armed, better organized, and more ruthless than ever before.
When the war comes, it won’t be a single confrontation like Miler.
It will be a grinding campaign of assassinations and territorial battles that could last for years.
The thunder is already rumbling on the Gold Coast.
The storm is coming.
