'It's the one thing the Hells Angels fear'
The law may have finally figured out how to bring down the notorious
gang, which evolved from a small group of bikers 60 years ago
into a global criminal empire. Tim Shufelt reports.
Tim Shufelt
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, March 22, 2008
"We can't be infiltrated, no cops can get inside on us, they
don't have the resources, the manpower, or the time to wait. We're
unbeatable and untouchable." -- Sonny Barger, Hells Angels
kingpin, quoted in the 2007 book Running with the Devil, by Kerrie
Droban
For police, the hardest thing to stomach was that Sonny Barger
was telling the truth. The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was untouchable
by law enforcement and invulnerable to informants and undercover
agents.
Mr. Barger is the world's best known biker -- the American legend
who founded the Hells Angels' feared Oakland chapter in 1957,
the surly bad ass who threatened to kill Keith Richards if he
did not keep playing after violence broke out at a doomed Rolling
Stones concert in 1969, the central renegade in Hunter S. Thompson's
Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle
Gangs, and the clever entrepreneur who built a small band of thugs
into a global empire of the underworld.
For years, he backed up his claim that the gang could not be
infiltrated with bulletproof security. New chapters sprouted in
cities around the world, with most adopting the onerous recruitment
process and code of secrecy that kept the Angels' inner circles
sheltered from police.
Law enforcement could not get the access it needed to build evidence
of Angels involvement in drug trafficking, prostitution, illegal
weapons and violence.
But while the world's most notorious biker gang celebrates its
60th anniversary this week, it is reeling from a series of recent
successful police operations, particularly in Canada, where the
Hells Angels' supremacy among bikers is virtually unchallenged.
Armed with recent federal anti-gang legislation and evidence
gathered by undercover agents and the rare co-operation of full-patch
Hells Angels, Canadian police and prosecutors are striking at
the heart of the gang's confidence in the loyalty among brothers.
"Up to now, when you had that patch on your back, internationally,
every criminal knew you were a righteous bad guy. You weren't
an informant. They just knew the Angels do not have informants.
That was something they didn't have to worry about. Now, just
because you're an Angel doesn't mean you're not an informant,"
says Insp. Gary Shinkaruk, head of the RCMP's outlaw motorcycle
gang unit in B.C. "Now you can see a lot of turmoil."
Not that being sent to jail is a big deal for most bearers of
the death's-head patch. In fact, doing time is almost a point
of pride. But the odds of getting arrested are rising in Canada
for the Hells Angels, which has already been declared a criminal
organization in court cases in Quebec and Ontario.
Next week, a B.C. Supreme Court judge will decide whether three
members of the East End Hells Angels chapter facing cocaine trafficking
charges were acting as a "joint venture" on behalf of
the chapter. A conviction under the anti-gang legislation could
mean longer prison terms and serious disruptions to the Angels'
operations, both legitimate and illicit. That's got the fearless
Hells Angels nervous, Insp. Shinkaruk says. And not just in B.C.
A "criminal organization" declaration could resonate
through Canada and other countries home to the Red and White.
While the relatively untested legislation is now difficult to
prove in court, a conviction could carry weight in future cases.
And some European countries have laws automatically criminalizing
an organization that has already been blacklisted by three other
countries, Insp. Shinkaruk says.
"It's the one thing the Hells Angels fear the most,"
says Julian Sher, investigative journalist and co-author of Angels
of Death and The Road to Hell. "They lost that battle in
Quebec, they lost that battle in Ontario and now they're facing
the battle of their lives in British Columbia." Both books
are national bestsellers and Mr. Sher is recognized as an expert
on biker gangs.
The Hells Angels have always maintained that they are mostly
law-abiding and should not be punished collectively for the misdeeds
of a few bad apples.
The club was founded in Fontana, California, in March 1948, taking
its name from a crew of American B-17 bombers in the Second World
War, who adopted the name from a 1930 Howard Hughes movie.
It wasn't until Sonny Barger and the Oakland chapter entered
the scene that the Angels gained attention and notoriety as an
inextricable part of the 1960s counterculture in California.
The Angels then presided over the event said to mark the end
of that turbulent decade: the free Rolling Stones' concert at
the Altamont Speedway in northern California on Dec. 6, 1969.
A restless crowd clashed with the bikers, and 18-year-old Meredith
Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels after
pulling a gun near the stage.
Ever since, the Hells Angels have been expanding with new chapters
in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa and South America.
All the while, the Hells Angels have conducted a global PR campaign
portraying themselves as motorcycle enthusiasts, cowboys for a
new generation and even defenders of democratic values.
The gang incorporated in North America, trademarked its brand
and set up chapter websites hawking clothes and merchandise to
legions of supporters. It organized rides to raise money for charity
and appointed spokesmen to deal with media.
At the same time, it continued to wreak its unique brand of havoc:
trafficking drugs around the world, muscling in on street criminals
and drug dealers and waging war with rival bikers. To at once
project those two conflicting public images, what Mr. Sher calls
a "Madison Avenue dream," and the vision of Sonny Barger,
is unprecedented in organized crime.
"The Mafia doesn't hold press conferences," Mr. Sher
says. "And the Triad doesn't have websites where you can
buy stickers and support T-shirts. The Hells Angels has by far
the most sophisticated PR campaign of any criminal gang in the
world. It's absolutely brilliant. And, overall, it works."
The Angels organization has always scoffed at its treatment in
the media. "The way we were depicted, we were like Vikings
on acid, raping our way across sunny California on motorcycles
forged in the furnaces of hell," Mr. Barger wrote in his
autobiography.
In many of the 30 countries with Angels chapters, the bikers
are regarded somewhere between mischievous rascals and mythological
knights of the road. And despite ever more sophisticated police
outfits dedicated to reining them in, the club's size remains
steady at about 3,000 members in more than 250 chapters worldwide,
according to Sgt. Eric Dupré, a national intelligence officer
with Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, a government agency
established in 1970 that facilitates the production and exchange
of criminal information and intelligence within the law enforcement
community.
Similarly, the Hells Angels in Canada have kept their numbers
after large arrest sweeps in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C.,
and the collapse of chapters in Halifax and Thunder Bay.
With about 460 full-patch members in 35 chapters, the monopoly
the Hells Angels enjoys in Canada is unrivalled in any other country.
"This country is strictly red and white," Sgt. Dupré
says.
The Outlaws are down to just a couple of chapters, and the Bandidos
were virtually wiped out after the murders of eight members in
Shedden, Ont., in 2006. Six full-patch members of the Bandidos
and two associates ranging in age from 28 to 52 were shot and
their bodies dumped in a farmer's field. Police called the massacre
an "internal cleansing" within the gang.
Of course, law enforcement in Canada is unmoved by claims that
Hells Angels members are unfairly targeted. Neither does the Canadian
public subscribe to the Angels' gentler constitution, Mr. Sher
says. "In Canada, it is widely accepted by a great number
of people that they are criminals."
The biker wars in Quebec went a long way in swaying public opinion
against motorcycle gangs. From 1994
until 2002, the Hells Angels, led by Maurice "Mom" Boucher,
battled Rock Machine bikers for control of the provincial drug
market. Each side waged bloody campaigns that left more than 160
dead, including 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, who was killed
by shrapnel from a bomb planted in a Jeep outside a biker hangout
in east-end Montreal in 1995.
Any pretense that the Hells Angels is a harmless brotherhood
is shattered by a "simple check with the court cases across
the country," says Michel Auger, the former Le Journal de
Montréal crime reporter who survived being shot in the
back six times in the paper's parking lot on Sept. 13, 2000, the
day after he ran a story on the latest round of murders.
"Canadians should be thankful to the Hells Angels of Quebec,"
Mr. Auger says. "Because of the foolishness of the Hells
Angels in Quebec in the '80s, Parliament acted to get tougher
laws against organized crime," Mr. Auger said.
Also, biker police in Canada got more determined. They realized
the only way to take down outlaw bikers was through infiltration
-- an expensive, lengthy and dangerous enterprise. "That's
always been one of the biggest challenges we've had. Just the
way they operate criminally, getting into that inner sanctum,
getting into those secret meetings and getting into the places
no one else can, that's really what you need to do," says
Insp. Shinkaruk. "Having an inside person is just paramount."
Traditionally, police have been unable to overcome the group's
military-like recruitment process, which is designed to weed out
the weak or disloyal and establish layers of security.
Becoming a full-patch member can take up to seven years, involving
several phases of membership and varying levels of subservience
to full chapter members, Insp. Shinkaruk says.
But nowhere in the world have police been so successful at infiltrating
the Hells Angels as in Canada. In March 2001, police in Quebec
arrested 138 bikers, including the entire Quebec Hells Angels
Nomads chapter in Operation Springtime, which involved planting
two police agents in the Angels-controlled Rockers gang.
In Ontario, Project Tandem resulted in the arrest of 15 Hells
Angels on drug, weapons and murder charges in September 2006.
And last April, 16 full-patch members were arrested in Project
Develop after police conducted dozens of raids and seized the
Toronto chapter's clubhouse, $500,000 in cash, 80 weapons, including
rifles and shotguns, more than nine kilograms of cocaine, and
almost 500 litres of concentrated GHB, the date-rape drug. In
both investigations, police had the help of full-patch members.
And the current Hells Angels trial in B.C. is a result of Project
E-Pandora, in which the RCMP paid a Hells Angels enforcer $1 million
to help collect evidence against the East End chapter.
Drawing on federal legislation passed in 2001 that defines a
criminal organization as three or more people benefiting from
serious offences, prosecutors in that trial aimed to prove the
Hells Angels chapter as a whole gained from the alleged offences.
But a conviction will not permanently blemish the Hells Angels
patch in B.C. It has to be proven in court with each new trial.
But it would carry stiffer penalties for the accused, would allow
police to more easily seize Hells Angels assets or prevent them
from operating legitimate businesses, and would give law enforcement
more discretion in putting Hells Angels under surveillance.
It may also cause tension within Angels' ranks. Members are under
strict orders not to plead guilty to any "criminal organization"
charges, Insp. Shinkaruk says. Members who run afoul of the law
will more and more have to draw on chapter funds to pay for expensive
legal defences.
And when you add the psychological blow of having been infiltrated
by police, there is the potential for some serious rifts among
members, he adds. Angels may be less likely to trust their full-patch
brothers automatically, or take on new members. And their partners
in criminal circles may be less likely to trust the Hells Angels
for fear of dealing with informants.
The toll is also being felt by law enforcement, however, says
Sgt. Dupré. "That's a fault of the judicial system
itself. The cases are getting so large, so complex, difficult
and costly to try. And at the end of the day, law enforcement
can only do so many projects at a time."
Of course, the Hells Angels aren't taking this onslaught lying
down. The co-accused and their lawyers vigorously defended against
the criminal organization label. And if it doesn't go their way,
the Angels will learn from it.
"They do their homework," Insp. Shinkaruk says. "Every
prosecution we have, they do an excellent job of sharing information,
both nationally and internationally. So it's hard to catch them
twice the same way."
All of this comes during a period of transition for the Hells
Angels. Like many organizations, the leadership is showing its
age, particularly in the United States. Mr. Barger is 69 years
old and, though he is no longer president of the Oakland chapter,
many other leaders are not far behind him in age.
"We're seeing a generational gap within the Hells Angels,"
Mr. Sher says. "In California in particular, the older guys
don't want to fight as much. They've been to jail. They now have
their mansions. They now have a mortgage to pay and wives and
children to support. And they don't want to go back to jail. They've
done their time and they're living high off the hog now."
That reluctance doesn't sit well with new young members eager
to reap the rewards of the patch they worked so hard to earn,
Mr. Sher says. And it's leaving them vulnerable to threats from
rival biker gangs, particularly the Mongols, a California-based
biker gang made up mostly of younger Mexican-Americans known for
drawing new recruits from street gangs.
But the Hells Angels has also shown a remarkable ability to adapt
and survive, like any resilient corporation. Not eager to replay
the carnage in Quebec, for example, the Hells Angels moved into
Ontario in 2000 by swallowing up several smaller motorcycle gangs
in a massive "patch-over."
And law enforcement harbours no delusions of ever ridding Canada
of the biker gang. "What they want is to marginalize the
Hells Angels. It's the difference between Mom Boucher being on
the front page as almost a folk hero, and the Angels being able
to walk with impunity into any bar and terrorize a city, or being
marginalized as the criminals that they are," Mr. Sher explains.
"Sonny Barger is proud of saying the sun will never set
on a Hells Angels patch. And he's right."
