Ben ‘Notorious’ Geppert was Australia’s original ‘Instagram bikie’ – a Hells Angel whose drug-fuelled rampages with gang members and heavily tattooed women were glamourised on social media.
Geppert, 32, was the bikie who famously exchanged blows with a rival outside a Gold Coast KFC in a viral video, who featured in a James Bond-style escape from police, and whose tattoos made him instantly recognisable when on the run.
His array of ink included the word ‘Vendetta’ above his eight eye, a gun on the back of his neck, a teardrop and an anarchy symbol on his face, plus the eight-one (representing H and A for Hell’s Angels).
They were all to mark events in his bikie life about which Geppert – in between prison terms – posted obsessively on his Instagram page @iamthenotoriousbg.
The intimidating facade was accompanied by a wild and often violent lifestyle fueled by cocaine and myriad other drugs.
Even when burying his beloved 17-year-old brother Harry, who was fatally stabbed on the Gold Coast in 2019, Geppert’s grief was subsumed by an anger, vowing to not ‘rest until I have made this person pay!’
And then there was the friendship between Geppert and ex-Bandido enforcer Brett ‘Kaos’ Pechey and their girlfriends, cousins Allaina and Rikki-Louise Jones, posting racy pictures online of their lives together.
That all ended in a vile Instagram battle.
It is hard to believe someone so submerged in an underworld of crime and violence could be the same man who this week was content to be making salad for lunch at his Gold Coast home, and reading ‘The Tale of Benjamin Bunny’ to his two little kids.
Ben Geppert and Allaina Vaider in their Gold Coast kitchen with the former bikie preparing lunch for his family, Ryder, five months (left) and Ayla, 18 months (right)
Geppert as a young bikie (left) joined the Hells Angels before going out on his own and gaining fame for exploits such as this punch-up (right) outside a Gold Coast KFC
Geppert has sworn off social media in his new home life with Claudia (above, reading The Tale of Benjamin Bunny to kids Ayla and Ryder) which has made him ‘happy and relaxed’
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I’M NOT ‘NOTORIOUS’ ANY MORE
It’s the same guy who kisses his partner Claudia McCallum goodbye each evening as he heads off to the nightshift painting lines on roads, a ‘straight’ job he chose both to pay the bills and still help with the kids during the day.
This Ben Geppert has ditched his nickname ‘Notorious’, and abandoned his 11,000 Instagram followers.
In fact he avoids social media altogether, preferring the down-to-earth pleasures of family life.
So committed is he to turning over a new leaf that he is slowly but surely having all those recognisable tattoos removed.
Now a 32-year-old, he is trying to be the respectful son his mother Lisa Geppert wanted him to be.
The first time Ben Geppert went to jail his mother refused to visit him and as he became the infamous ‘Insta-famous’ bikie, she was reluctant to even use her surname for fear people might realise her connection to him.
He earned another stint behind bars when he ripped off his ankle tracker and tried to commandeer a dinghy in Gold Coast’s Tallebudgera Creek.
Now Geppert vows that that sentence at the Capricornia Correctional Centre in Rockhampton will be his last, now that he has abandoned the drug-fuelled life.
In an exclusive interview and photo shoot about leaving his wild crime-filled bikie lifestyle behind, Geppert reveals: ‘I was on every drug, I thought I was Superman.’
Ben Geppert and Claudia McCallum (above with Ayla and Ryder at Burleigh Heads) plan to eventually travel to Fiji to get married by which time he will have had more tattoos lasered off his face
Geppert, 32, is getting ‘Vendetta’ lasered from above his right eye, and all the inked tattoos taken off his face, but the process is painstaking and will take years
‘I was caught up in that lifestyle which brought out another side of me that had to be influenced by drugs and alcohol and the bad influence of other people.
‘I was in the Hells Angels and in a gang you end up in a grave or in jail. It’s very ugly and they are all a bunch of dickheads.
MY LIFE NOW – MY PARTNER AND MY KIDS
‘I don’t have anything to do with any of that crowd. I don’t have friends, I stay away from everyone. I have work friends, the kids and Claudia.
‘I am a different person than what I was. I don’t even know who that person was.’
For a future bikie, Ben was late getting into crime, committing his first petty offences just nine years ago, then escalating to armed burglary, home invasion and bashing a man with a baseball bat over a $500 drug debt.
He had been a physically small kid in a family of nine children, and was bullied at school because of his size, growing up with ‘a chip on my shoulder’.
When he was 21, he witnessed his father having a heart attack and effectively ‘dying’ in front of him and lying ‘unresponsive’ until he was revived ‘and that played with my head for a long time’.
‘I started hanging out with bikies and criminals. I had tattoos, gangs back then were a brotherhood.
Claudia was heavily pregnant with Ryder (in her left arm) and daughter Ayla was a toddler when Ben did his last jail stint and now vows never to return to prison
Geppert said he regrets his former gang life every day, but at at the same time loves his new life and credits partner Claudia and his kids Ryder and Ayla with giving him tranquility and purpose
Geppert lashed out on social media against other bikies like Brett ‘Kaos’ Pechey (left with his then girlfriend Rikki-Louise Jones), whose photo he edited (right) with a pig snout and ‘000’
‘My mum found out (that I was going to join the Hells Angels) and rang me and said please don’t do it. As a kid with a big ego … I wasn’t going to be told.’
THERE’S NO BROTHERHOOD – THEY’RE DICKHEADS
Geppert went ahead and and joined the Hells Angels, but soon realised that there was no brotherhood, instead being used as a ‘mule’ by gang bosses that raked in the drug money and enduring a risky lifestyle which saw him ‘stabbed, kidnapped, shot at’.
He admits he was unable to control his self-destructive behaviour once he got on drugs, and began having beefs with other clubs and bikies.
‘I started experimenting with cocaine and that’s when it downhill for me,’ he said.
He chose ‘Notorious’ as his Instagram name and ‘everyone just ran with it’ and he would lash out at others on social media.
‘I had a bad ego sort of thing, so if anyone attacked me I’d have to attack them back, being a loudmouth,’ he said.
Out on his own and still aged in his 20s, Geppert now jokes that ‘I was crystallised myself’ on drugs, ‘juiced up on steroids. I was on everything. I was a wrecking ball.’
Geppert had been estranged from his family, who he would berate on Instagram saying they should be dead, even telling his mother she should kill herself.
Family life on the Gold Coast is everything now for Ben Geppert who says ‘I’m feeling the best I’ve ever felt’ and has plans with Claudia McCallum to take their kids to Fiji and have a family wedding
Ben Geppert and his father at the funeral for 17-year-old Harrison Geppert who was tragically killed in a knife attack at a Gold Coast park in 2019
He was making news almost every week with his Instagram feuds, escapades and his brushes with the law.
LOSING MY BROTHER
He concedes now that he set a bad but alluring example for his decade-younger brother Harrison who ‘sort of looked up to that in a way and wanted to have a part of that’.
Just after 5:30pm on September 4 in 2019, a Wednesday, Harrison Geppert was stabbed with a 9cm marine knife by his former friend Jarvis Farrier at a popular Gold Coast dog park in Varsity Lakes. He died at the scene.
Ben was at a restaurant when he received a text message about the attack but it did not spell out ‘the full extent’.
He drove to Frascott Park and saw his mother there, the police, a blue forensic tent and ‘that’s when it hit me’.
‘Harry, he sort of looked up to me in a way and I suppose I feel a little bit to blame for him passing,’ he said.
‘That’s not the right thing to do – you don’t want kids looking up to that.
‘When I was in the gang I was so distanced and I never reached out. I heard a lot of the things he was doing and I was in no state to take him under my wing.
‘I was doing stupid things too. It’s something that haunts you forever.’
Geppert was eventually able to leave the Hells Angels on ‘good terms’, giving a lie to the common belief that membership was for life.
‘It’s not like the old days where if you left you used to end up dead. It’s all fake now,’ he said.
‘I regret being in a gang every day.’
Ben Geppert is ‘awesome’ with his children says partner Claudia. Pictured is the former bikie with his 18-month-old daughter Ayla at the Gold Coast
Geppert says committing crimes and getting arrested (left) as well as using social media which resulted in a falling out with other bikies like Brett ‘Kaos’ Pechey (right, with Geppert) no longer have a place in his life
CLAUDIA AND THE KIDS TURNED MY LIFE AROUND
Claudia McCallum and Ben Geppert met online while he was out of jail working as a concreter and pipe-layer and she was working in the mental health and disability sector.
Geppert credits his relationship with Claudia and the arrival of their children to giving him tranquility and the strength to tip the last vestiges of his old life into the garbage.
Geppert completed a Queensland Government’s Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG) Exit program in 2020 which partially funded his tattoo removal to take place over 24 months.
Claudia accompanied him to the painful laser removal sessions as they waited for the arrival of their daughter Ayla in 2022.
Geppert was wearing a satellite tracking anklet and ‘and doing well’ under community supervision for previous offences.
But it was then that he learnt that his brother Harry’s killer was due for release.
He started drinking and, in the early hours of January 15, 2023 at home in Varsity Lakes, had the mental explosion that led to his tearing off his ankle tracker, which set off an alarm at Queensland Corrective Services who alerted police.
He took off from home, at one point diving into the creek where he unsuccessfully tried to steal a boat before being arrested in Burleigh Waters.
Life is good for former Hells Angels bikie Ben Geppert who left the gang and then went out on his own as ‘Notorious’ but has now left all that behind for work and a stable family existence
Geppert does the cooking at home with son Ryder, daughter Ayla and partner Claudia in their calm new life on the Gold Coast
NEVER GOING BACK TO JAIL
He told Daily Mail Australia this week that because of the incident ‘I now refuse to drink’.
Police immediately returned Geppert to custody and last year he pleaded guilty to wilful damage to corrective services property, being unlawfully at large, and attempting the unlawful use of a vessel.
He served several months in prison, which was hardest on their daughter Ayla when the only ‘visit’ was via video from the Rockhampton jail, and difficult for a pregnant and emotionally ‘very up and down’ Claudia.
Ben was released a a month before Ryder’s birth at Gold Coast Hospital late last year.
‘It was definitely a relief,’ Claudia said, ‘I was pretty big, my feet were killing me. It was good to have him there to help with Ayla.
‘Ryder is now five months old and very cheeky. He (Ben) is awesome interacting with the kids, always out doing stuff, there’s never a moment when we’re bored.
‘He starts work at 10pm every day. We have the day together. He’s the cook in the house, steaks, shepherd’s pie.
‘I plan on going back to work when Ryder is 18 months old, in the mental health industry, I want to work in rehab.’
For his part, Ben Geppert has never been happier having left the ‘ugly and dark’ gang lifestyle behind and restoring his relationship with his parents and having his own family life.
Despite the pain of the tattoo removal, he is eager to get all his face ink off because ‘people judge you straight away’ and some from his body ‘as they relate to a previous partner’.
He feels ‘always good, more relaxed about life’ and hopes ‘to make a career out of’ helping others.
‘You need a blue card that allows you to work with kids and I have a criminal history, a criminal record from when I was 23.
‘But I’m looking to be a mentor, a life coach.
‘I’m feeling the best I’ve ever felt. I want to go overseas and get married in Fiji, a wedding with just the family.’
Claudia said her future husband was a a ‘gentle soul’ at heart who loved their domesticated life, even ‘getting up every morning and making the beds’.
