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Insight/San Francisco Chronicle
May 7, 2006
A Hell of a time for the Angels

By Julian Sher

It has been a hell of year for the Hells Angels - and it is not likely to get any better for the Bay Area members of the world's most famous outlaw motorcycle gang.
Oh, right. It's not a gang. Just a bunch of motorcycle enthusiasts.
"The club is a motorcycle club, it is not an organized gang, it is not a criminal enterprise,'' said Jim Bustamante. He's the lawyer representing "Joey" Wilson, the president of the bikers' Frisco chapter who was busted two weeks ago - along with his sergeant at arms and 10 associates -- on methamphetamine and cocaine charges last week. All the accused have denied the charges.
"I know a lot of members," said Mr. Bustamante. "They're great guys,"
Well, why aren't these guys great enough to at least have the courage of their convictions? After all, by their own admission, the Hells Angels form one the most elite clubs in the world - it can take more than two years of careful screening before you are judged worthy enough to wear the famed Death Head patch on your back.
If the Angels are such a select bunch, then when do more than a few bad apples become a rotten bushel? And how do the Angels explain that it is often not low-ranking new joiners but established leaders of the organization who have been charged - as in the recent Bay Area busts - -or convicted?
This past summer, Guy Castiglione, the president of the San Diego chapter of the Hells Angels pleaded guilty to gang charges, admitting that he had conspired to distribute methamphetamine and kill members of the rival Mongols.
Earlier this year, the former president of Chicago's Hells Angels chapter pleaded guilty to federal drug and racketeering charges and two other former Illinois chapter leaders pled guilty to a decade-long conspiracy of violence and intimidation to protect turf for drug sales.
The truth is the legendary biker, uh, gang, is facing assaults externally and internally. On the outside, the Angels are nervously looking over the shoulders as the aggressive Mongols - -recruiting young Hispanic street gang toughs many of whom don't even ride bikes - establish chapters up and down the Californian coast.
Internally, police agencies have stepped up their efforts to infiltrate the once impenetrable biker empire.
It was the work of an FBI undercover operative and eight months of wiretaps that led to the arrests two weeks ago in San Francisco.
Mike Kramer, a one time "full patch" member, infiltrated the San Fernando Valley chapter for the Bureau of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to nail a drug dealer. Then he went around the country to gather evidence that helped the federal authorities sweep up more than 40 Hells Angels on murder and racketeering charges for a bloody shootout with the Mongols at a Laughlin casino in 2002.
Their trial - -where the bikers will face the dreaded Violence in Aid of Racketeering (VCAR) gang law and the government will try to prove the Hells Angels are in fact a "criminal enterprise" - is set to get underway this September in Las Vegas.
But it won't be easy. A similar racketeering case in Arizona against 16 bikers collapsed earlier this spring, with most of the defendants pleading to greatly-reduced sentences.
The Arizona bikers are not in the clear yet. Informant Mike Kramer is also the key witness against two Mesa bikers charged with murder. Kramer alleges that he and his fellow Angels stabbed an innocent woman to death, dumping her body in the desert, simply because she dared to talk back to the boys in their clubhouse.
"I want to cut the bitch's head off," Kramer claimed one of his bikers said.
That's the problem with the Angels. For all their mystique about being just a bunch of rowdy riders, a lot of dead bodies keep piling up around them.
The latest was Michael Demetrescu, 46, whose body was discovered at Ocean Beach, a gun by his side and a bullet in his head. Police suspect suicide but are still investigating. Demetrescu - who lived right next to the Frisco chapter clubhouse of the Hells Angels -- was facing 40 years to life in prison if found guilty of federal methamphetamine trafficking charges as part of the FBI's investigation in the Bay Area Hells Angels.
Demetrescu won't be the last victim of the Hells Angels' outlaw credo - and all too often innocents get caught in the middle of biker bloodshed.
Sonny Barger, who brought the Angels to world wide prominence from his headquarters in Oakland, openly boasted in his autobiography that "the Seventies were gangster era for us."
Unfortunately, that gangster ethos never stopped in the decades that followed. With a viciousness that would make Tony Soprano proud, Barger and his boys enforced club discipline. Back in 1986 when they were on the hunt for wayward members, Barger and his Oakland boys invited the Vallejo chapter to a meeting - and promptly beat the crap out of them, according to an FBI informant who witnessed - -and tape recorded - the event.
They then installed Gerry "Butch" Lester as the new president of Vallejo. Along with another Angel, Lester tracked down a member named Billy Grondalski who had the misfortune quit the club in "bad standing." A gun went off accidentally, killing Grondalski - so the two bikers proceeded the massacre the unfortunate witnesses: his wife and two children, including his five year-old daughter. They then torched the house, not before literally carving out their pound of flesh -- Grondalski's Hells Angel tattoo - from his body.
It took a determined deputy sheriff from Mendocino County 18 years before he finally tracked down and brought the two biker assassins to justice. One got four life sentences; the other 29 years to life.
"There's this rotten, idiotic stupid ethic of the Hells Angels that permeates everything about this case," the prosecutor told the jurors in one trial in 2004. "The Vallejo chapter was in danger of having their charter pulled because they were not able to take care of HA business. They had to show the rest of the club that they could discipline their members."
Like their biker leathers, the "good ol' boy" image of the Angels is getting a little frayed at the edges. Earlier this year, the city council in Hollister -- known as the "Birthplace of the American Biker" - voted to cancel official sponsorship of the annual Fourth of July rally that attracts tens of thousands of Angels and rival gangs to the town, in part because of the mounting security bills and safety concerns.
It was in Hollister that the myth of the rebel biker - immortalized by Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" - was born back in the 1940s, when rampaging bikers trashed the town. Like the aging bikers on Harleys, that myth is growing old and tired.
Still, the biker legend runs deep in America. They are the modern outlaws of the west: Harleys have replaced horses as the hero rides off into the sunset, defying the established law and order.
Many law-abiding, fun-loving riders cherish that freedom of the road. All power to them.
But there is no reason to buy into the Angels' attempt to wrap themselves in the flag of defiance and rebellion.
A freewheeling, even raucous lifestyle is fine. Pushing drugs and killing people is not.
It's time we realized the Angels are anything but.
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Julian Sher is the co-author, along with William Marsden, of "Angels of Death: Inside the Biker Gangs' Crime Empire" published this month by Carroll & Graf.