Cossacks vs bandidos
“He was saying, ‘I told Jeff (Pike) to turn the other cheek from what I’m about to do,’” Treviño said. Ultimately, no confrontation ensued because no Cossacks were around.ĭays after Waco, Treviño testified, he attended a Bandidos motorcycle rally, during Memorial Day weekend in Gulfport, Mississippi, where Portillo himself addressed Bandidos members in attendance. Treviño said he understood that the force to be used “could be anything from a fight to murder.”
#COSSACKS VS BANDIDOS TRIAL#
More: Bandidos trial details motorcycle gang's attacks on El Paso chapter members in RoswellĪlso testifying Friday was Edward “Tiger” Treviño, a former member of the Bandidos’ Hill Country chapter, who said that during a meeting in March 2015, his chapter president informed members that Portillo “wanted us to go show to Odessa to show force to the Cossacks.” Vasquez said as many as 60 law officers showed up and remained outside or near The Last Few bar in Odessa, where dozens of Bandidos or their support club members had assembled. The information was based in part on recordings in which Portillo was heard saying he was dispatching Bandidos to Odessa as a show of force against the Cossacks, according to federal prosecutors. “We.met with two high-ranking officials of the Cossacks and strongly suggested they not be in the area,” Vasquez said. More: Chuco Tango gang member pleads guilty in drive-by shooting murder of Barrio Azteca rivalįBI agent Eleazar Vasquez testified that his agency and several others flooded Odessa on April 11, 2015, after “we had received an intelligence report that the Bandidos were coming to Odessa to attack the Cossacks.” But the pair is on trial over allegations that they directed the Bandidos’ criminal enterprise, including ordering or sanctioning threats, extortion or violence against rivals. Prosecutors largely tip-toed around details of the Waco confrontation because neither Jeffrey Fay Pike, then the Bandidos’ national president, nor John Xavier Portillo, the club’s former vice president, are charged in connection with that.
Monday’s testimony dealt largely with other purported incidents involving Cossacks, who lost the most bikers in Waco, and the Bandidos, who lost a member in that fight that also involved police shooting at the bikers at the Twin Peaks restaurant. A month before the infamous biker confrontation in Waco in May 2015 that killed nine and left 20 injured, law enforcement rushed to Odessa and headed off what they thought would be a violent clash there between Bandidos and the Cossacks, according to testimony Monday in a racketeering trial in San Antonio of two former top leaders of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club.