William George "Jock" Ross (born 5 August 1943) is a Scottish-born Australian outlaw biker, best known as the founder and the "Supreme Commander" of the Comanchero Motorcycle Club and for his involvement in the Milperra massacre of 1984. Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment with Judge Roden childing him as one of the men most responsible for the shoot-out at the Viking Tavern.
Youth
Ross was born in Glasgow, Scotland into a working class family. Ross grew up in the Gorbals neighborhood of Glasgow, where his father worked as a lorry (truck) driver. Ross stated of his youth: "In the old Glasgow days you never backed off, that’s how you survived. The Gorbals was tough and you had to be tough too." He served in the British Army in the Royal Engineers. Ross joined the British Army at the age of 17 and served for 7 years. As an engineer, he was involved in clearing minefields left over from the Second World War in Libya as well as laying minefields in the Aden Protectorate (modern Yemen) and Hong Kong. After his honorable discharge, he settled in Australia, making his home in New South Wales. In 1966, he settled in a coastal flat and then moved to Point Clare. Ross-who was known to his friends as "Jock" instead of William-worked variously as a lorry driver and as an apprentice blacksmith.
The Comancheros
The "Supreme Commander" Ross befriended a number of Australian veterans of the Vietnam war, saying in a 2019 interview: "I came out of the army, came here. People come out of the army, especially soldiers coming back from Vietnam back in the '70s, the late '70s … they came, and they were treated like lepers … not real good. Me, as an ex-soldier, I empathised with them". Ross founded Comanchero Motorcycle Club in 1968 with the name being taken from a 1961 John Wayne Western film The Comancheros that Ross adored. The Australian journalists Lindsay Simpson and Sandra Harvey described Ross as a natural "leader of men", an extremely charismatic man whose machismo and toughness inspired much devotion from other men. In 1971, Ross purchased a property along the then rural Mangrove Mountain Road for $800 dollars that became his home. Settling with Ross in his caravan were his first wife Sandy and their infant daughter Deidre. Ross found the sunny New South Wales countryside to be a refreshing change from the decaying industrial neighborhoods of the Gorbals where he had grown up. Ross had known a number of motorcycle riders who liked to drink in the pubs along a coastal road north of Sydney and persuaded them to join the Comancheros. In late 1973, Ross led the Comancheros in series of brawls against another outlaw biker club, the Kings. In response to a warning from the Newcastle police, Ross relocated the Comancheros to the Sydney suburb of Parramatta. Ross hung a sign on the wall of the Comancheros' clubhouse that read: "If it's white, sniff it/If it's female or it moves, fuck it/If it narks-kill it".
Ross had an intensely authoritarian leadership style shaped by his military background and he gave himself the grandiose title of the "Supreme Commander". He was described as leading with "an iron fist". Like many other outlaw bikers, Ross's politics tended towards the extreme right and he had a gigantic Nazi swastika flag prominently hanging on the wall of the Parramatta clubhouse. Ross had the new members of the Comancheros swear allegiance to not only the Comanchero club, but also to himself as the "Supreme Commander". Ross led his men on weekly para-military drills intended to prepare them for brawls against rival bikers. The Comancheros were considered to be the most violent of Australia's many outlaw biker clubs in the 1970s and 1980s as Ross was constantly engaged in biker wars. The Canadian journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden wrote that Ross was well known for planning his attacks "with military precision". Sher and Marsden described Ross as a man with "disturbing visions of running his own private army". Besides for the endless drilling, Ross formed his own elite force of especially tough fighters, which he called the Strike Force. Many Comancheros disliked Ross as one former member told the media: "If I wanted to march around in the fuckin' backyard, I would had joined the fuckin' army".