April the 8th, 2022.
A quiet remote stretch of Wakefield Road outpass Freeman’s Water Hole in the Hunter Valley.
A 27year-old man pulls up expecting a club meeting.
Instead, he’s met by the sergeant-at-arms of the Nomad’s Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.
A man who’s about to make an example of him in front of the others.
The younger man had been caught out days earlier testing positive for methamphetamine on a routine police stop, a breach of the club’s own rules.
And in this particular chapter, rulebreaking came with consequences decided on the spot.
Moments later, he was shot above the knee, left in the dark in pain on a stretch of road most people would never think to look twice at.
That single act, a deliberate, calculated shooting dressed up as internal discipline, became the centerpiece of a case that would eventually put three senior figures of the Nomad Sydney chapter behind bars.
But it wasn’t an isolated incident.
It was one entry in a seven-month run of organized violence that police say tore through the Hunter region, carried out by men who, on paper, held official titles inside the club.
A sergeant at arms, a treasurer, a vice president.
Titles that gave their crimes a chilling kind of structure most street level violence doesn’t have.
Months earlier, the same enforcer had led a group into a home in West Wall’s End, kicking down the door and leaving blood on the walls of a man they believed had disrespected the club.
Hunting through the house for evidence linking him to a rival gang.
Months later, acting on a tip passed along from inside a prison cell, he forced his way into another home.
This time armed, alongside an accomplice, a break-in that ended with a woman slashed badly enough to need surgery, the pair searching for drug money, they never actually found.
By the time police finally caught up with everyone involved, the man at the center of it all, the one giving the orders, the one who pulled the trigger on that dark stretch of road, was staring down 11 separate charges.
A judge would later describe him as someone who’d spent more than half his adult life behind bars.
A man with what the court called a history of genuinely disgusting acts.
When sentencing finally came, he was handed 13 and a half years, the heaviest term among everyone swept up in the case and by some distance.
So, what actually turns a person into the kind of enforcer capable of shooting a younger member over a drug test on a stretch of road picked specifically because nobody would see it happen?
Was this simply the logical end point of a life spent inside outlaw motorcycle culture where loyalty and punishment are treated as one in the same thing?
Or was there a moment somewhere earlier where this could have gone differently?
Today, we’re going through the full case, the home invasions, the kneecapping, and the sentencing that finally caught up with a man who’d spent decades inside that world.
If cases like this one where club loyalty tips into pure brutality are exactly why you keep coming back to this channel, hit subscribe to True Crime Aussie 2 right now.
Stay with us till the end.
There isn’t a great deal on the public record about who Jason Wayne Bailey was before 2021 before his name started appearing regularly in Newcastle court reports.
Unlike some of the more publicly documented figures in this world, Bailey never gave interviews, never built a social media presence, never sat down to explain his own version of how he ended up where he did.
What exists instead is a court record.
And within that record, one detail stands out above almost everything else.
When Judge Roy Ellis finally sentenced him in 2024, he noted that Bailey had spent more than half his adult life behind bars already, long before any of the offenses covered in this case took place.
That detail matters because it reframes the entire story.
This wasn’t a man radicalized suddenly by club politics or someone who fell into serious violence for the first time in his late 40s.
By the time Bailey held the rank of Sergeant-at-Arms in the Sydney chapter of the Nomads, he was already, by the court’s own description, someone with a longestablished pattern of offending behind him.
A pattern serious enough that a judge, having seen the full picture, described his conduct as reflecting a history of what he called genuinely disgusting acts.
The sergeant-at-arms role itself is worth understanding properly because it explains a great deal about what came next.
Inside Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs, the position isn’t ceremonial.
It’s the enforcement arm of the club’s internal structure.
The person responsible for discipline, for security, for making sure the club’s rules are respected, and that anyone who steps out of line understands there are consequences.
It’s a position built entirely around the threat and the actual use of force.
Clubs don’t hand that role to just anyone.
It goes to someone who has already demonstrated repeatedly that he’s capable of delivering on that threat without hesitation.
By September 2021, when this particular case begins, Bailey held that position within the Sydney chapter and the men around him treated his word as close to final when court documents describe the leadup to the first home invasion covered in this case.
They describe a group of senior members sitting around discussing a perceived slight against the club and Bayiley’s response settling the matter almost instantly.
“It’s not okay,” he told them, “and something has to be done about it.”
Within the internal logic of that world, a sentence like that from the sergeant-at-arms wasn’t really a suggestion.
It was closer to an order.
That’s the man this story picks up with.
Not a young recruit finding his way into club culture, but an established enforcer already deep inside a role built on violence, already carrying whatever history had led a judge to later describe his life in those terms.
What changed over the seven months that followed wasn’t who Bailey was.
It was the scale of what he was willing to direct and eventually carry out himself once he held enough authority inside the nomads to act on it without anyone standing in his way.
That authority would be tested and used for the first time properly on a September night in 2021 at a house in Greta that would set everything else in motion.
Behind the individual incidents that would eventually make up this case sat something police treated as more significant than a string of unconnected assaults, a structure.
NSW police built a dedicated operation, Strike Force Andola, specifically to investigate what investigators believed was a coordinated pattern of violence being directed from within the Nomad’s own leadership rather than a series of isolated flare-ups between individuals who happened to share a club patch.
That distinction shaped how the case was ultimately prosecuted.
Alongside the specific charges relating to each incident, the break-ins, the shooting, the assaults, Bailey and his co-acused also face charges of participating in a criminal group.
A charge that exists specifically to capture organized offending carried out under a shared banner rather than treating each act as though it happened in isolation.
It’s a heavier charge to prove because it requires establishing not just what happened but that the structure around it.
The club hierarchy, the shared purpose, the coordination between members was itself functioning as the engine behind the violence.
The list of people swept up under that umbrella extended beyond the three names most associated with the case.
Alongside Bailey, Justin Bell, and James Dylan Boardman, investigators also arrested a woman named Carly Moon in connection with the broader strike force investigation.
An indication of how far the net was cast once police decided to treat the club’s internal operations as a genuine organized crime target rather than a handful of disconnected offenders.
One detail from the West Wars End invasion captures the mindset behind all of it particularly well.
When Bailey and three other men stormed that Conveyor Street home, he wasn’t dressed to blend in or avoid identification.
He was wearing a shirt carrying the Nomad’s logo and colors out in the open during a violent forced entry for an organization that in other contexts works hard to protect its members from exactly this kind of exposure.
That choice reads less like carelessness and more like a statement, a deliberate signal that the violence being carried out belonged to the club itself, not just to the individuals swinging the fists.
That’s really what separated this case from an ordinary assault matter and why it drew the level of investigative resource it did.
Police weren’t just building a case against four or five individuals.
They were attempting to demonstrate with evidence solid enough to survive a courtroom that an entire tier of a chapter’s leadership, its sergeant-at-arms, its treasurer, its vice president had used their official positions to organize and carry out serious violence as a matter of club business, complete with internal discussions, informal votes on how to respond to perceived disrespect, and a clear chain of authority running from Bailey down through everyone who followed his lead.
Whether that structure held together as cleanly in court as it did on the night these crimes were committed is a separate question.
But the fact that prosecutors pursued it that way as an organization’s conduct, not just a handful of bad actors within it, says a great deal about how seriously authorities in the Hunter region had come to treat the nomad’s presence in their community by the time this investigation got underway.
Solving a case like this one wasn’t simply a matter of identifying who’d been shot and asking around.
The victim of the Freeman’s Water Hole kneecapping, the 27-year-old Nomad’s nominee was eventually found lying on a public street in Edgeworth, wounded, having been dumped there after the shooting rather than left at the original scene.
In the immediate aftermath, he told police almost nothing.
He was well known to investigators already with his own links to the nomads and despite the seriousness of his injuries, he refused to cooperate with the strike force trying to identify who was responsible.
For police that left a straightforward but demanding path forward, build the case with autumn.
That work fell to strike force unola and it meant piecing together what had happened almost entirely from physical and circumstantial evidence rather than victim testimony.
Investigators spent significant hours reviewing CCTV footage from the surrounding area, trying to trace vehicle movements in and out of an isolated stretch near the intersection of Wakefield and Sugarloaf Range roads.
The kind of remote little location that made for an effective dumping ground precisely because there was so little chance of anyone witnessing what happened there.
Detectives also physically combed the site itself for forensic evidence and eventually seized a white Toyota Camry believed to be the vehicle used to transport the victim before he was left in the Edgeworth car park.
That kind of investigation takes time and it shows in how the case against Bailey unfolded through the courts.
He wasn’t picked up immediately as the shooter.
He was already in custody on separate charges relating to the criminal group offending and an earlier home invasion when police laid the Wakefield Road charges against him, making him the third person formally charged in connection with that specific shooting as the investigation progressed.
When his legal team first sought bail on the new charges, they withdrew the application before it was even heard.
A decision that in practice kept him behind bars while the broader case continued to develop around him.
For close to two years, Bailey maintained his innocence on the most serious charges when he appeared before Newcastle local court in mid 2023.
He formally denied any involvement in both the Edgeworth machete attack and the Wakefield Road kneecapping, pleading not guilty to 11 separate offenses and setting the matter on a path toward a full trial alongside his co-acused.
For a period, it looked as though the crown would need to prove its case in front of a jury, relying on the CCTV work, the forensic evidence, and whatever else Strikeforce Onola had managed to assemble without a cooperating victim.
That changed in March 2024.
Rather than proceeding to trial, Bailey reversed course entirely, appearing in Newcastle District Court to plead guilty to the core charges, the shooting, the aggravated break and enter, participating in a criminal group, and the firearms offenses tied to both the Luger pistol and an SKS semi-automatic rifle police had also recovered.
It was a decision that avoided a trial altogether, and one that set the stage for the sentencing that would follow later that year.
The three incidents at the center of this case each followed their own internal logic.
And looking at how each one actually unfolded says a great deal about how this group operated when it decided someone needed to answer for something.
West Wall’s end came first and it started according to court documents with a disagreement about how to handle it when one of the men at that house in Greta reported that the West Wall’s end victim had been talking down the club.
Justin Bell initially wanted to settle it himself, one-on-one.
The group didn’t go with that.
They put it to an informal vote, and once the decision went the other way, five men in total ended up in a car headed for the victim’s front door instead.
What followed wasn’t a fair fight of any kind.
A coordinated forced entry, a search through the house for anything connecting the victim to the rival rebels club, and a bashing severe enough to leave visible blood on the walls.
Before the victim managed to get out, hide in a neighboring backyard, and call Trip0 himself.
Edgeworth, six months later, started somewhere entirely different, not with an insult overheard in a room, but with a phone call from inside a prison, passing along an address of a woman the club believed owed money connected to its drug operations.
Bailey and another man drove to that address, armed, and the entry itself nearly went differently than it did.
Bailey first tried firing his Luger pistol directly through a window to force his way in.
When the weapon malfunctioned, his accomplice kicked the door down instead.
What followed inside that house left the woman with injuries serious enough to require surgery, and the two men left without finding the cash they’d come for, getting into a waiting Hyundai Veloster and driving off into the night.
Then came Wakefield Road, the incident that would end up defining the entire case in the public record.
The setup here was different again.
No spontaneous grievance, no jail cell tip off, but something closer to a planned internal tribunal.
The nominee had been pulled over by police on his way south and tested positive for methamphetamine, a breach that, under the club’s own rules, couldn’t simply be overlooked.
He was told to come to what he understood would be a club meeting.
Instead, on that isolated stretch of road, Bailey asked him directly whether he understood what he’d done.
“You know you [ __ ] up,” he said.
The nominee agreed.
Bailey shot him above the knee moments later.
“What happened immediately after captures something about Belle’s role in all of this just as clearly as the shooting itself captures Bailey’s.
As the wounded nominee lay there in obvious pain, he asked Belle whether things were now settled, whether this meant it was over.
Belle’s answer left no ambiguity about what the club actually expected in return for letting him walk away.
Yeah, he told him, “If you keep your mouth shut.”
Sentencing, when it finally came, played out across two separate hearings months apart, and the gap between them says something about how the courts approached each man’s role differently.
Bailey went first.
In July 2024, standing alone in front of Judge Roy Ellis after his guilty plea earlier that year, the court handed down a maximum term of 13 years and 6 months with a non-parole period of 8 years and 6 months, meaning Bailey would need to serve at least that long before any chance of release, regardless of how the remainder of his sentence was structured.
Given everything the judge had already said about his history, that length wasn’t treated as excessive by anyone involved in the case, it reflected a court that had looked at a shooting, two armed home invasions, and a documented pattern of prior offending, and concluded that a decade or more inside was the minimum proportionate response.
Bell and Boardman’s sentencing followed in December, and it’s here that the case took an unexpected turn.
Belle received a maximum of 5 years and 3 months with parole available from as early as February 2026.
Boardman received 4 years and 6 months with a longer wait ahead of him.
Parole eligibility not arriving until January 2027, largely because he’d spent much of the preceding period out on strict bail conditions rather than in custody.
Time that didn’t count toward his sentence the same way Bell’s time on remand did.
Crown prosecutor Brian Cosello wasn’t satisfied with either outcome.
In court, he argued both sentences risked being manifestly inadequate legal language for a sentence so far below what the offending actually warranted that an appeal court might be justified in overturning it.
His argument centered heavily on the West Walls Enzand invasion, specifically describing it as featuring what he called significant violence carried out with weapons in the specific context of organized outlaw motorcycle club offending.
The kind of aggravating factor that in his submission should have pushed both sentences considerably higher than where the court ultimately landed.
It was notably the same argument Costello had already made months earlier at Baileyy’s own sentencing, suggesting the crown viewed the entire case across all three men as one where the courts had consistently underpunished the seriousness of what had actually occurred.
That kind of prosecutorial push back doesn’t automatically change anything.
An unduly lenient submission is an argument made in the room, not a formal appeal lodged afterward.
And whether the director of public prosecutions actually pursues a crown appeal against either sentence is a separate decision made later, often only in the clearest cases.
What it does reveal, though, is a genuine gap between how seriously prosecutors believed this offending deserved to be treated and where three different sentencing outcomes actually landed.
Bailey’seye term roughly three times longer than Bell’s despite both men being present for at least two of the three major incidents and despite a judge in one courtroom accepting an outcome the crown was simultaneously describing in another as inadequate for the crime.
More than two years passed between the first arrests in this case and the moment all three men finally stood in front of a judge having admitted what they’d done.
A stretch marked, according to court reporting, by dozens of adjournments before anyone entered a guilty plea.
For much of that period, the case moved in fits and starts with different men taking different paths through the system depending on their individual circumstances.
Boardman’s path looked noticeably different from his co-acused.
For a stretch of that time, rather than remaining in custody throughout, he spent part of the pre-trial period on house arrest.
Released back into a fairly ordinary civilian existence, even as the case against him continued working through the courts.
Court reporting noted he tried to get a bail variation that would let him return to work as a brick layer, a request that was knocked back.
He also had consistent support through the process.
A woman believed to be his mother was noted as attending several of his hearings.
Sitting with him as proceedings unfolded.
It’s in detail that sits oddly alongside the club’s vice president title.
A reminder that the men involved in this case were outside their roles inside the nomads, still someone’s son, still holding down ordinary jobs, still building lives that ran in parallel to whatever they were doing on club business.
The West Walls End invasion itself carried more detail about how deliberately armed the group had come.
Bell and Boardman were both carrying extendable batons that night, while a fourth man involved in the attack brought a baseball bat.
It wasn’t a spontaneous scuffle that got out of hand.
It was a group that had equipped itself specifically for violence before they’d even left the house in Greta.
Treating the confrontation as something to be handled with weapons from the outset rather than as a last resort.
What happens next legally remains genuinely open.
The crown’s unduly lenient submissions raised at both Bailey sentencing in July and again at Bell and Boardman’s in December put a marker down that prosecutors believed all three outcomes fell short of what the offending deserved.
Whether that translates into an actual crown appeal, a formal application to have a higher court review and potentially increase any of these sentences is a decision that sits with the director of public prosecutions, made separately and often well after the original submissions are heard in court.
As things stand, all three sentences remain exactly as handed down, with Bayileleyy’s earliest possible release still years away, and Belle already approaching his own parole eligibility.
That gap between what a court decided and what prosecutors publicly argued it should have decided is in its own way a fitting note for a case built almost entirely around questions of proportion.
How much violence a perceived insult justified, how much force a drug debt warranted, how severe a punishment methamphetamine use inside the club deserved.
The crown’s position suggests that same imbalance followed the case all the way to its conclusion with the courts, in the prosecution’s own view, still landing on the lenient side of what three men who ran an organized crime wave through the Hunter region had actually earned.
Step outside the specifics of this case, and it sits inside a pattern New South Wales has been grappling with for years.
What actually happens when an outlaw motorcycle club’s internal discipline structure starts operating as its own private justice system answerable to nobody outside the club itself.
That’s really what this entire case describes when you strip away the individual incidents.
A man talks about the club in a way members don’t like and rather than any external process deciding what happens next, an internal vote in a lounge room in Greta decides his fate instead.
A woman is alleged to owe money connected to the club’s operations, and rather than any court or debt collector pursuing it, two armed men turn up at her front door in the middle of the night.
A young nominee fails a drug test, and instead of simply being expelled or suspended, he’s shot as a matter of internal discipline, then quietly returned to a car park to make his own way to hospital.
Every one of these responses exists entirely outside the ordinary legal system.
A parallel structure of judgment and punishment running quietly alongside the actual justice system that eventually caught up with all three men.
New South Wales authorities have spent well over a decade trying to legislate against exactly this dynamic.
Consorting laws, criminal group participation offenses, the kind of dedicated strike force response that produced unola in this case.
All of it exists because law enforcement has repeatedly found that treating outlaw motorcycle club violence as a series of unconnected individual assaults badly understates what’s actually happening.
When a sergeant-at-arms tells a room it’s not okay and something has to be done about it and five men act on that instruction without further discussion, that’s not really five individual decisions.
It’s a chain of command functioning exactly as designed, just aimed at something the courts define as serious criminal offending rather than legitimate discipline.
What makes cases like this one particularly difficult to prosecute and to prevent is that the system relies heavily on members loyalty holding and loyalty inside these structures tends to hold precisely because everyone understands what happens to people who break it.
The Wakefield Road nominee experienced that firsthand, shot for one rule violation, and then explicitly warned to stay quiet about it afterward.
That’s not incidental to how these clubs function.
It’s close to the entire mechanism, a system that polices its own members through fear, specifically so that outside authorities never get the cooperation they’d need to intervene earlier.
Seen against that backdrop.
What makes this particular case notable isn’t that the violence happened.
Similar incidents at smaller scales likely go unreported and unprosecuted across the country every year, protected by exactly the same code of silence tried to enforce at gunpoint on that stretch of road.
What made this one different was that for once the investigation actually broke through, building a case solid enough to survive without a cooperating victim, strong enough to force guilty p from all three men eventually, and detailed enough to expose in open court exactly how an entire chapter’s leadership had been operating for the better part of a year.
Three men held three different titles inside the Sydney chapter of the Nomads during that seven-month stretch.
Sergeant-at-arms, treasurer, vice president.
And by the time it was all over, those titles had translated into three very different sentences and three very different versions of what accountability actually looked like.
Jason Bailey, the one who gave the orders and eventually pulled the trigger himself, will spend the better part of a decade behind bars before any chance of release.
Justin Bell and James Dylan Boardman, present for the violence, but rarely the ones delivering it directly, will likely be back out in the community within the next year or so, walking back into ordinary life, a brick laying job, a mother’s support, whatever remains of the world they knew before any of this happened.
That gap is worth sitting with because it’s rarely the question this whole case leaves behind.
Presence and participation clearly matter to how the courts weighed each man’s conduct.
But so did who physically pulled a trigger, who swung a weapon, and who simply stood nearby making sure a badly injured man understood what silence was worth to him.
Those are meaningfully different levels of involvement.
Whether the sentencing gap between them actually reflects that difference fairly or whether as prosecutors argued repeatedly in front of two separate judges all three outcomes fell well short of what this kind of organized weapon involved violence actually deserved is something reasonable people watching this case could easily disagree on what’s harder to argue with is what this case reveals about how these structures actually function dayto-day away from the headlines and the club colors.
Not chaos, not disorganized thugery.
A functioning internal hierarchy capable of holding informal votes, issuing instructions, and carrying out serious violence with something close to procedural discipline.
All of it invisible to the outside world until an investigation like Strikeforce Undola manages to pull it apart piece by piece without a single cooperating victim to make the job easier.
That’s really the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath this entire story.
The system that punished the West Walls End victim, extorted the woman in Edgeworth, and shot a nominee for a failed drug test wasn’t a breakdown of order.
It was order functioning exactly as its members understood it to function, just aimed in a direction the actual justice system was eventually forced to step in and stop.
So, we’ll leave you with the same question worth asking of any case like this one.
Does a sentencing gap this wide represent fair, individualized justice, recognizing that not everyone in the room that night carried equal responsibility?
Or does it risk sending an uncomfortable message of its own?
One where standing next to violence rather than committing it directly becomes its own kind of protection.
If we’ve missed anything here or if you’ve got more detail on how this case has developed since, let us know in the comments.
We’d rather get it right than leave it standing uncorrected.
And if cases like this one, where club loyalty curdles into something far darker, are exactly why you keep coming back to this channel, hit subscribe to True Crime Aussie 2 right now.
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