On the night of 14th May 2025, a man was dropped outside the emergency department of a hospital in Perth’s southern suburbs and left there.
He’d been shot multiple times in his upper body and his leg.
He also had burns, deliberate ones, applied specifically to the areas of his skin covered in tattoos in what police believe was a targeted attempt to remove the ink that marked him as a member of the Common Chero motorcycle club.
His name is Leslie Lethal Less Grantham.
He was 51 years old, a patch member well known to Western Australian police.
And according to the detective who led the investigation, none of what happened to him was really about money, territory, or a rival gang.
It was about the fact that he was trying to leave.
This video isn’t really about Les Granthm specifically, though we’ll go through exactly what’s known about what happened to him.
It’s about a broader question this channel has now circled repeatedly across dozens of cases documenting outlaw motorcycle clubs in Australia and New Zealand without ever fully answering it directly.
What actually happens when someone tries to leave one of these organizations, not resign quietly, not simply stop showing up, actually leave in the way Grantham appears to have been attempting.
Popular culture has a phrase for this blood in blood out.
The idea that once you’re part of an outlaw motorcycle club, membership is permanent.
And any attempt to exit gets punished with exactly the kind of violence this channel is about to describe in detail.
It’s a genuinely useful phrase for understanding the fear that keeps people inside these organizations.
It’s also, as this account will show, a considerable oversimplification of what actually happens in practice.
Because this channel has now documented a genuinely wide range of outcomes for people who’ve tried to step away from major outlaw motorcycle clubs.
From Granthm’s case at one extreme through to former national presidents who walked away with a formal ceremony and their own brother’s blessing.
Before we go further, a note on how this video is put together.
What’s independently confirmed about the Grantham case comes from Western Australian police statements and multiple cross-check news reports.
This account hasn’t been able to establish who’s actually responsible, whether anyone has been arrested, or what specifically Granthm himself was trying to leave to do with his life.
Genuine gaps in the public record that this account will name directly rather than filling with assumption.
What this video can offer instead is context, drawing on this channel’s own extensive prior research into similar cases to place what happened to Granthm inside a much broader, more carefully documented pattern.
Because Granthm’s case, brutal as it is, isn’t actually unique in the broader landscape this channel has traced.
A former Mongols national president was voted out by his own club and went on to rebuild a public life as a fitness influencer.
A former commoner figure’s own stepson was killed in violence connected to an unresolved leadership dispute.
A former rebels vice president may have survived his own targeted ambush in a hardware store car park in an incident this channel could only partially verify.
A former nomad’s national president burned his own colors with his brother’s explicit blessing and went on to build a media career doing exactly that.
Four different men, four dramatically different outcomes, all connected to some version of the same underlying question.
And Grantham’s case arguably sits at the furthest, most violent end of that entire spectrum.
In this video, we’ll go through what’s actually documented about the attack on Les Granthm, then work through this channel’s own broader body of research into what leaving an outlaw motorcycle club has actually looked like across the cases.
This channel has covered in detail, searching for the actual pattern underneath a myth most people have only ever encountered as a cliche.
If you’re new here, this channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting.
No dramatizing, no glorifying.
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We’ll start with the night less Grantham was found outside Rockingham Hospital and what the CCTV police later released actually shows.
According to Western Australian police, Leslie Grantham was found collapsed outside the emergency department of Rockingham Hospital at around 10:00 on the night of Thursday 14th May 2025.
He had gunshot wounds to his upper body and leg and burns to his legs.
Injuries, Detective Senior Sergeant Anthony Thompson said, were consistent with an attempt to remove tattoos connected to the Common Chero Motorcycle Club.
He didn’t arrive at the hospital under his own power.
Someone dropped him at the entrance and left.
Thompson’s own public comments delivered at a press conference the following day are worth quoting directly because of how plainly they frame what police believed had actually happened.
He described the decision to leave Grantham there rather than staying to ensure he received help as a callous way to treat someone with life-threatening injuries.
He confirmed Grantham had been left with permanent life-changing injuries and stated clearly that this had happened to him specifically because of his membership in an outlaw motorcycle gang.
Grantham was, according to police, a formerly patched member of the commoner, not a peripheral associate, but someone genuinely well known to Western Australian police through prior contact.
This account hasn’t been able to independently document in detail.
That gap is worth naming.
Honestly, this channel doesn’t have verified information about Grantham’s specific criminal history before this attack, how long he’d been a member, or what position, if any, he held within the club structure.
What’s independently confirmed is narrower.
His patch membership, his identity, and the nature of the injuries he survived.
More than a month after the attack, in June 2025, police released CCTV footage as part of the ongoing investigation, hoping the public release would generate new information.
The footage shows three vehicles, a white SUV, a black utility vehicle, and a white utility vehicle arriving at a car park near Orburn Grove train station.
People are seen moving between the vehicles before they leave the car park separately.
Police alleged the white utility vehicle was later the one that arrived at Rockingham Hospital with Grantham inside before disappearing from further sightings.
This account is deliberately not describing the footage in more graphic detail than that, consistent with the standard this channel applies to violent content generally.
The footage shows planning and movement, not the assault itself.
And what matters for this account is what it establishes about premeditation, not a frame by frame account of what happened.
It’s worth being precise about what this evidence does and doesn’t confirm.
The CCTV, as police have characterized it, suggests a coordinated group effort involving multiple vehicles and multiple people consistent with an organized action rather than a spontaneous unplanned confrontation.
It doesn’t on its own establish who specifically ordered or carried out the attack and this account hasn’t been able to locate independent reporting confirming any arrest connected to the case as of when this account was compiled.
That remains as far as this channel can verify an open investigation.
What can be said with confidence based entirely on Thompson’s own public statements is the specific motive police attributed to the attack from the outset that Grantham had been trying to leave the commoner and that the people responsible turned on him because of it.
It’s this specific claim that leaving rather than any debt, betrayal, or rival dispute was the actual trigger that makes Grantham’s case worth examining alongside the other departures this channel has documented.
Across its broader coverage of Australian outlaw motorcycle clubs because it’s rare for police to state a motive this directly and this simply.
Most of the cases this account has covered involve considerably more ambiguity about why specifically someone was targeted.
Grandantham’s case, according to the officer who investigated it, doesn’t have that ambiguity.
He was targeted, police say, because he wanted out.
If Grantham’s case represents the most violent possible version of leaving an outlaw motorcycle club.
This channel has also documented cases sitting at a meaningfully different point on the same spectrum.
Beginning with Toby Mitchell, whose own departure from the Mongols happened through a mechanism entirely different from anything alleged in Grantham’s case.
Despite both men holding senior standing within major Australian clubs, Mitchell’s path into outlaw motorcycle club life began with the Bandidos, where he rose to national sergeant-at-arms, one of the most senior enforcement positions available in the club.
In November 2011, he survived a targeted shooting outside a Melbourne gym, hit multiple times and requiring around 30 separate surgeries to recover.
He was shot again in 2013 in a separate incident.
Both attacks remain formally unsolved.
This account has already traced in its earlier dedicated coverage of Mitchell’s story how he eventually left the Bandidos following the second shooting, spent roughly 6 years without formal club affiliation, and then in 2019 joined the Mongols, rising within 18 months to become president of that club’s Melbourne chapter.
What happened to Mitchell’s position in 2022 offers a genuinely instructive contrast to Grantham’s case.
Being targeted by external violence for trying to leave, Mitchell was formally removed by his own club through what was described as a near unanimous internal vote, reportedly triggered by allegations that he’d been associating with someone connected to a police witness in a fellow member’s criminal case.
According to reporting on the decision, senior Mongols figures had repeatedly warned Mitchell about this specific association before the club ultimately moved to expel him.
Some accounts describe the departure as effectively voluntary, framed publicly as Mitchell choosing to step back from the lifestyle.
Other more detailed reporting describes a considerably more direct process, a formal vote conducted specifically to remove him.
It’s worth sitting with how different this mechanism is from what allegedly happened to Grantham.
Even though both men held genuine senior standing within major clubs at the time they left, Mitchell wasn’t hunted down, shot, or physically marked as an example to others.
He was subjected to an internal disciplinary process.
However coercive that process might have felt from the inside that concluded with him simply no longer being a member.
Free to walk away and build an entirely new public life.
Within a relatively short period after his expulsion, Mitchell had reinvented himself as a fitness and lifestyle personality on social media, building an audience of several hundred,000 followers, with his own survival of the earlier shootings becoming a central recurring part of that public narrative.
This account has already examined in its dedicated coverage of Mitchell’s story the genuine tension in that specific reinvention a public brand that keeps his underworld history central to his current identity rather than fully moving past it.
Raising real questions about whether that represents someone productively using an unavoidable public history or someone continuing to draw commercial value from decades of gang affiliation and documented violence.
What matters for this account’s specific comparative purpose is narrower.
Mitchell’s actual physical safety following his departure.
As far as this channel has been able to establish through its own prior dedicated research, Mitchell hasn’t faced any further targeted violence connected specifically to his 2022 expulsion.
He remains a public visible figure, continuing to post content and maintain his social media presence years after leaving the club that once employed him as a senior enforcer.
It’s worth asking directly why Mitchell’s departure produced such a different outcome from what allegedly happened to Grant.
Because the answer isn’t simply that one man was more senior or more valuable to his club than the other.
Both held genuine leadership positions.
Part of the difference may lie in who initiated the departure and how.
Mitchell’s exit, whatever its precise internal mechanics, was processed through the club’s own formal structure with the club itself making the decision to end his membership.
A process that by its nature gives an organization a controlled, internally sanctioned way to remove someone without that removal being read as evidence of weakness or vulnerability elsewhere in the club’s ranks.
A member forced out by his own leadership through an internal vote everyone else in the club is aware of and implicitly endorses doesn’t necessarily represent the same kind of threat to internal discipline that a member unilaterally deciding to walk away on his own terms might represent particularly if that member is believed rightly or wrongly to be carrying knowledge that could be useful to police or a rival organization.
There’s a further point worth drawing from Mitchell’s case connected to the specific reason given for his expulsion.
He wasn’t removed for trying to leave outright.
He was removed over an alleged connection to a police witness, a breach of the specific foundational code of silence.
This channel has documented as central to how outlaw motorcycle clubs maintain internal discipline across virtually every organization it’s covered.
That’s a meaningfully different trigger than what Grantham allegedly experienced.
Mitchell’s removal addressed a perceived security risk within the club’s existing membership.
Grantham’s alleged attack addressed the fact of his departure itself, the specific act of trying to leave, independent of any suggestion he’d cooperated with police or compromised anyone else’s safety.
This distinction matters for understanding the broader pattern this account is trying to trace across its comparative cases.
It suggests the popular blood in blood out framing may be capturing something real but applying it too broadly.
The genuinely dangerous moment based on the cases this channel has documented may not be leaving itself in the abstract.
It may be specifically the perception that someone leaving poses an active ongoing risk through cooperation with authorities, through knowledge that could damage the club if shared, or through a departure that other members might read as a challenge to the leadership’s authority to control who stays and who goes.
Mitchell’s departure, controlled and formally sanctioned by the club’s own leadership, didn’t trigger that specific fear.
What allegedly happened to Grantham suggests his departure did.
What this account turns to next is a case where the cost of departure and the underlying disputes connected to gang leadership more broadly extended beyond the person actually trying to leave reaching instead into that person’s own family.
Not every account this channel has documented of the price connected to outlaw motorcycle club life involves the departing member himself paying the cost directly.
Vince Focarelli’s story, covered in detail elsewhere in this channel’s broader work, illustrates a different, in some ways more devastating pattern.
One where the violence connected to a disputed leadership claim reached not the man at its center, but a young relative with no independent standing in the conflict at all.
Vocarelli’s own position within Adelaide’s outlaw motorcycle club scene was, this account has already established, genuinely contested.
He publicly claimed leadership of the common cheros in South Australia.
His own lawyer at the time disputed that claim directly, suggesting Fakarelli had been formally stripped of any legitimate standing within the club over suspected financial impropriy and had instead founded a smaller breakaway group operating under a borrowed name.
Whatever the true state of that dispute, it existed inside a genuinely volatile environment.
One that across late 2011 and into early 2012 produced an attempted car bombing, a shooting that left Fakarelli with serious lasting injuries.
And finally, the attack that took his 22-year-old stepson, Giovani’s life.
It’s worth being precise about what connects this case to the broader theme this account is tracing because Focarelli’s situation isn’t a straightforward example of someone trying to leave a club at all.
It’s arguably closer to the opposite, a man contesting his right to remain at a position of leadership he may never have formally held in the first place.
What makes it relevant here is the underlying pattern it shares with Grantham’s case.
Violence directed not necessarily at the person whose formal status was actually in question, but at whoever happened to be nearby when that dispute finally turned physical.
Giovani Fakarelli held no independent position within any outlaw motorcycle club.
His connection to the violence that ended his life was entirely a function of his relationship to his stepfather.
This account in its earlier dedicated coverage of Focodelli’s story was careful to note that the case remains formally unsolved.
No one has ever been charged in connection with the attack that killed Giovani.
Despite a significant sustained police investigation involving South Australia’s Australian Crime Commission and its coercive hearing powers, Focarelli himself later sued the state police force, alleging they’d known of a threat against his family for more than a week and failed to prevent it.
A claim this account can’t independently verify and one that remains, as far as this channel has been able to establish, unresolved.
What Ferarelli’s case adds to this account’s broader examination is a genuinely uncomfortable observation.
The price of contested standing within these organizations doesn’t necessarily fall on the person whose position is actually in dispute.
It can fall on people connected to that person by blood or marriage who never sought any standing within the club themselves and who have no independent way of extracting themselves from a conflict they didn’t choose to be part of.
This is a meaningfully different kind of cost than either Grantham’s alleged targeting for trying to leave or Mitchell’s formal internally sanctioned expulsion.
A reminder that the violence this channel has documented across outlaw motorcycle club culture doesn’t always respect the boundary between someone who’s chosen this life and the people who simply happen to be connected to them.
There’s a further related pattern worth drawing from this channel’s coverage of Alex Vela’s family specifically because it illustrates yet another distinct version of the same underlying theme.
Departure imposed from outside the club entirely rather than negotiated or fought over within it.
Vela, founder and longtime national president of the rebels, was permanently barred from re-entering Australia in 2014 after his residency visa was cancelled on character grounds while he happened to be visiting his birth country.
His own account of that decision describes profound ongoing personal loss, separation from his wife, his children, and his nine grandchildren across more than a decade with no successful legal path back despite multiple court challenges.
Vela’s case is worth including here because it demonstrates that a person’s relationship to an outlaw motorcycle club doesn’t only end through violence, internal politics, or personal choice.
It can end through an entirely external bureaucratic mechanism, a government decision that in Vela’s specific case arrived without any accompanying criminal conviction based purely on an administrative character assessment he was never fully permitted to see the underlying evidence for.
His nephew Damian Vela inherited the national presidency almost by default simply because the alternative was an organization with no leader legally able to set foot in the country it operated in.
What connects Vela’s case to the broader theme this account is tracing.
Despite its very different mechanism is the same underlying question.
What does it actually cost to stop being the person in charge or to stop being part of the organization at all?
For Vela, the cost was primarily personal and relational.
A decade of separation from family, absorbed at a distance with no direct physical violence involved at any point.
For Grantham, allegedly the cost was direct, physical, and severe.
For Giovani Focarelli, the cost was fatal, despite him never having sought any position within the organization, whose internal politics ultimately killed him.
Taken together, these three cases, Mitchell’s controlled internal expulsion, Focarelli’s family absorbing violence connected to his own contested standing, and Vela’s externally imposed bureaucratic exile already demonstrate that leaving an outlaw motorcycle club isn’t a single consistent experience with a predictable outcome.
It’s a category covering genuinely different mechanisms, different levels of the organization’s own control over the process, and dramatically different consequences, ranging from a smooth transition into a new public career through to the death of someone who was never actually a member at all.
What this account turns to next is two further cases, Paul Marandi and Moody Tajure, that sit closer to Grantham’s own experience, specifically involving physical violence connected directly to questions of departure and public visibility after leaving.
Two further cases this channel has documented offer a closer comparison to what allegedly happened to Les Granthm, because both involve physical violence connected directly to a former or departing member’s continued visibility after stepping back from active club life, though with meaningfully different levels of verification behind each one.
Paul Masandi held a senior position as vice president of the rebels Rockingham chapter, the same Western Australian region where Grantham’s own attack later took place before a 2014 conviction connected to a serious unrelated assault.
This channel’s dedicated coverage of Masandi’s case already established the genuine limits of what’s independently verifiable about his more recent life, a podcast interview in which he described surviving an assassination attempt, and social media indications suggesting he’d since moved from the rebels to the Mongols.
Despite genuinely sustained repeated searches, this account was never able to independently confirm the specific assassination claim through court records or established news reporting.
A gap this channel chose to name directly rather than presenting an unverified claim with false confidence.
It’s worth including Masandi’s case here specifically because of what that verification gap itself demonstrates.
If his own account is accurate, it would represent a case genuinely similar in shape to Granthams, a senior WA bikey figure targeted with serious violence in the same general region connected to his own shifting position within the club scene.
But this channel’s inability to independently confirm it means it can only be treated as a data point of uncertain weight, not folded into this account’s broader pattern with the same confidence as the other cases already covered.
That uncertainty is itself worth taking seriously because it suggests the true scale of violence connected to departures and shifting loyalties within Western Australia’s outlaw motorcycle club scene specifically may be somewhat larger than what reaches confirmed independently verified reporting.
Moody Tjour’s case offers a considerably more solidly documented version of a similar underlying pattern.
Tjur rose to become national president of the nomads in 2018 before resigning within months, burning his own colors with his brother’s explicit blessing and building a public media career around exactly that story of departure and reform.
In December 2022 at a hardware store car park on the Gold Coast, he was attacked by four men who, according to his own account, taunted him directly about the media career he’d built, asking, as they assaulted him, where his podcast was now.
This account has already examined in its dedicated coverage of Tajjour’s story the genuine ambiguity connected to that specific incident.
An underworld source told journalists the attack was a deliberate setup connected to an earlier confrontation that same morning involving a Mongols affiliated rider.
This channel wasn’t able to independently verify that specific characterization beyond the single source it came from.
But the core physical event itself, the assault and its public documented aftermath, is considerably better confirmed than Masanti’s own account of his experience.
What Tajur’s case adds to this comparative picture is a specific sharp illustration of a pattern worth naming directly.
Public visibility after departure appears to function across multiple cases this channel has now documented as its own distinct source of continued risk.
Separate from whatever risk exists simply from having once been a member.
Tajjur wasn’t attacked while quietly running his cafes or his trucking business away from public attention.
He was targeted specifically in a context connected to the media career built around his own gang history.
Mocked directly for the specific public reinvention that made him recognizable enough to be a target in the first place.
It’s worth connecting this back to Toby Mitchell’s own considerably more successful reinvention covered earlier in this account because the contrast is instructive.
Mitchell has built an even larger, more sustained public platform around his own gang history and survival of earlier violence.
And as far as this channel has been able to establish hasn’t faced comparable renewed violence connected to that visibility.
The difference may simply reflect luck or specific enemies each man happened to have made that the other didn’t.
It may also reflect something about the specific manner of each man’s departure.
Mitchell’s formal clubs sanctioned expulsion may have closed the question of his standing more completely than Tojour’s voluntary resignation, even with his brother’s blessing, given his brother’s own continued position as the club’s sitting national president kept Tajour’s own family connection to the organization’s internal politics genuinely live rather than fully severed.
There’s a further detail worth drawing from Tajour’s case specifically because of how directly it echoes the core claim in Grantham’s own story.
Tajjo’s attackers, according to his own account, weren’t simply settling an old score connected to his time as a member.
They were reacting to his current ongoing public presence, treating his continued visibility built specifically around his departure story as itself a provocation worth responding to with violence.
If Grantham’s own attempt to leave the common cherro similarly represented an active visible challenge to the club’s authority over who gets to walk away and on what terms rather than a quiet private decision made without fanfare.
It would help explain why his own departure attempt allegedly drew such an extreme immediate response compared to departures this account has documented proceeding without violence.
Taken together, Masandi’s unverifiable account and Tojour’s wellocumented one suggests a genuine, if incompletely mapped pattern across Western Australian and Queensland bikey culture, specifically visibility, whether through media presence or through the specific manner of a public departure, appears to correlate with continued risk in a way quiet, unannounced exits don’t necessarily share.
What this account turns to next is a direct attempt to synthesize everything traced across these five cases into a clearer picture of what actually seems to determine whether leaving an outlaw motorcycle club ends safely or doesn’t.
Having traced five distinct cases across this account, Granthm, Mitchell, Faulerelli, Vela, Marzandi, and Tajure, it’s worth stepping back and asking directly what factors, if any, appear to genuinely distinguish the departures that ended safely from the ones that didn’t.
The clearest pattern this account can identify based on the cases it’s documented centers on who controls the process of departure.
Mitchell’s exit was managed entirely by his own club through a formal internal vote, a mechanism that whatever its coercive undertones gave the organization itself ownership over the outcome and appears to have closed the matter definitively enough that no further violence followed.
Grantham’s alleged departure, by contrast, appears to have been entirely his own initiative, imposed on the club rather than sanctioned by it.
Precisely the kind of unilateral action this account has already suggested may read within these organizations as a direct challenge to leadership authority rather than a personal decision the club can simply accept and move past.
A second factor worth naming is whether the departing person retains or is perceived to retain any active connection to the organization’s ongoing internal politics.
Tajjour’s brother remained the nomad’s sitting national president throughout Tajour’s own post-eparture life.
Meaning Tajour’s family connection to the club’s leadership never fully closed, even after his own formal exit, in a way that may have kept him more entangled in the organization’s internal disputes than a genuinely clean break would have.
Mitchell, by contrast, appears to have left with no comparable ongoing family or structural connection, pulling him back toward the club’s internal affairs.
A third factor suggested most directly by Grantham’s own case and reinforced by Tajur involves visibility itself.
Every case in this account where violence followed a departure or a contested standing involved some degree of public exposure, a media career built on the departure story, a physical presence in the same general geographic area the person was trying to leave.
Or in Grantham’s own case, the simple fact that police describe him as well known to WA authorities, suggesting a level of pre-existing visibility that may have made his own departure harder to process quietly from the club’s perspective than a lower profile member’s exit might have been.
It’s worth being honest about the limits of this analysis, consistent with the standard this channel applies throughout its work.
Six cases drawn from this channel’s own prior research rather than a comprehensive statistically representative sample of every documented departure from an Australian or New Zealand outlaw motorcycle club can suggest a pattern without proving one conclusively.
It’s entirely possible other factors this account hasn’t identified, specific debts, specific grievances, specific rivalries between individuals rather than structural features of departure itself, actually explain the different outcomes more than the broader categories this account has proposed.
What this account can say with confidence is narrower the popular simplified version of blood in blood out implying automatic near universal violent retribution for any departure doesn’t match the actual range of outcomes this channel has documented across its own research.
Some departures end in a fitness brand and half a million social media followers.
Others end with a man dropped at a hospital entrance, shot and burned, left there by the people who did it.
What determines which outcome a specific person gets appears to depend less on the simple fact of leaving and more on how that leaving happens, who controls it, how visible it is, and whether it genuinely closes the question of that person’s connection to the organization or leaves it open in ways the club’s remaining members might read as an ongoing challenge to their own authority.
This account set out to answer a question this channel has circled repeatedly across its broader coverage of Australian and New Zealand organized crime without ever directly confronting it.
What does it actually cost to leave an outlaw motorcycle club?
Having traced six distinct cases in detail, the honest answer is that the cost varies enormously and the specific factors this account has identified as potentially explaining that variation.
Who controls the departure?
Whether it stays entangled with the organization’s ongoing politics and how visible the person remains afterward offer a genuinely useful framework without providing a fully predictive one.
It’s worth returning in closing to Les Grantham’s own case specifically because it remains among everything this account has covered the one this channel understands least completely.
This account doesn’t know who attacked him.
It doesn’t know whether anyone has been arrested.
It doesn’t know what he was actually trying to leave the commoner to do or what his life looked like before police released the CCTV footage that briefly made his case a matter of public record.
What it does know with confidence is what detective senior sergeant Anthony Thompson stated directly and publicly that a man was shot, burned, and abandoned outside a hospital and that police believe it happened specifically because he was trying to leave.
It’s worth sitting with how genuinely unusual that clarity is compared to the other cases this account has traced.
Most departures and contested standings this channel has documented involve real persistent ambiguity about motive competing accounts, unresolved investigations, family members offering different versions of events, formal denials sitting alongside informal underworld characterizations that never quite resolve into settled fact.
Grantham’s case, at least as police have publicly framed it, doesn’t carry that same ambiguity about why.
It carries instead a different kind of uncertainty, everything else about who and what comes next.
There’s a broader reflection worth offering, connecting this specific comparative account back to the wider body of work this channel has built across dozens of cases documenting Australian and New Zealand organized crime.
This channel has repeatedly found that these organizations prove considerably more durable than any individual leader tenure within them.
Clubs that survive arrests, exiles, internal votes, and violent leadership disputes.
Cycling through presidents and senior figures at a pace that makes tracking who’s actually in charge at any given moment a genuinely difficult task, even for a channel dedicated to doing exactly that.
What this specific account adds to that broader picture is a parallel observation about individual members rather than organizational leadership.
The actual experience of trying to leave these organizations appears just as variable, just as dependent on specific, sometimes unpredictable circumstances as the experience of trying to lead them.
That variability matters for how this channel thinks about the broader mythology surrounding outlaw motorcycle clubs.
Specifically, the bloodin, blood out framing that treats departure as automatically universally dangerous.
This account’s own research suggests that framing captures something real about the genuine risk involved without accurately describing the full range of what actually happens.
Toby Mitchell left safely through a process his own club controlled and sanctioned.
Alex Vela left through an external bureaucratic decision with no violence involved at all.
However devastating its personal consequences turned out to be.
Moody Tajour left with his own brother’s blessing and still years later found himself surrounded in a car part by men mocking the very public reinvention that departure had allowed him to build.
Unless Grantham, according to the detective who investigated what happened to him, was shot, burned, and left outside a hospital simply for trying.
What this account can offer in place of a single definitive answer to the question it opened with is this.
Leaving an outlaw motorcycle club in Australia or New Zealand isn’t governed by a single predictable rule.
However much the popular mythology around these organizations suggests otherwise.
It’s governed by a genuinely wide range of specific situational factors, some of which this account has been able to identify with reasonable confidence and some of which remain even after tracing six separate detailed cases genuinely outside what this channel or anyone working from public reporting alone can fully explain.
Les Grantham’s own case sits at the most severe end of that entire range.
A reminder delivered in the plainest possible terms by the police officer who investigated it that for at least some people connected to these organizations, the popular mythology isn’t an exaggeration at all.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting rather than speculation.
If you’re new here, that’s the standard we hold to on every case, including, as this account has tried to demonstrate throughout, cases where drawing an honest, careful comparison across this channel’s own prior research offers more insight than any single story could provide on its own.
Subscribe and turn on the bell if you want to see where this one and the broader pattern it’s part of goes next.
