Angels who do the Devil's work;
Critic's choice

By RAY CONNOLLY

Daily Mail (London)
May 5, 2006

ANGELS OF DEATH
by William Marsden and Julian Sher
Mayhem on wheels: Hells Angels are far from harmless rebels
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BILLY Grondalski had had enough. With a wife and family to support, he decided to leave the gang of Hells Angels in California with whom he'd been running.

Unfortunately he was still wearing his 'patch', his death's head Hells Angels emblem. It was tattooed onto his skin.

To a Hells Angel, wearing a patch when you've left the gang is a sign of disrespect.

Grondalski had to be taught a lesson, so two of the gang were sent to his house to 'talk to him'.
It wasn't a long conversation.

Grondalski was shot dead, possibly by accident. His wife, however, had witnessed the shooting. So she was killed, too, as was her 17-year-old son.
The worst was still to come.

Grondalski's five-year-old daughter had also seen the shooting. She was hiding, terrified in a back room, holding a toy car.

One of the Angels, a man she knew as Uncle Chuck, found her, held her up by her ponytail and began to slice at her neck with his knife until her spinal cord was severed. The other Angel delivered the coup de grace by shooting her through the head.

Still the killers had not finished.

With their knives, they then carved the Hells Angels tattoo from the arm of the dead man and took it as a trophy.

In any normal world, associates of such savages would have rushed, horror-stricken, to the police when they learned what had happened. But the Hells Angels, the motorcycle gang that now operates in more than 25 countries, does not contain normal people.

Quickly, one colleague returned to the place of murder and set fire to it to remove any evidence, another melted down the gun, while others put the slice of arm bearing the Hells Angel patch in a barrel and burned it.

No one called the police because, whatever the obscenities - and murder and rape are not infrequent - all members of Hells Angels have, like the Mafia, taken a vow of silence. They don't rat on each other - at least not until they're facing life imprisonment. They talk then, all right.

For nearly 60 years, since motorcycle gangs emerged out of California and were glamorised by Marlon Brando in the ridiculously camp movie The Wild One, the leather-clad bikers have tried to portray themselves as romantic, harmless, modernday outlaws, who want nothing more than to ride their bikes and be left alone.

To some naive observers, their founder Sonny Barger is almost a lovable American folk hero, with his self-promoting autobiographies, which conveniently leave out most of his history of violence.

THE idea that the Angels are simply a fun motorcycle club is nonsense, as anyone who has ever seen these extreme Rightwing, swastika-bearing, racist, bullying hoodlums riding menacingly in packs will know.

And now a couple of brave Canadian investigative journalists, William Marsden and Julian Sher, have tied together police campaigns against the bikers in America, Australia, Holland, Scandinavia and Britain, and come up with a devastating inventory of international violence and drug-running.

Take, for instance, the story of Cynthia Garcia, the woman who had the bad fortune to be picked up by a couple of bikers when they wanted some female company at their Arizona lodge.

Perhaps she should have worried when they began to ply her with alcohol.

Certainly she shouldn't have badmouthed the Angels when she was told to shut up. For such cheek four of them stabbed her to death, one of them trying, and just failing, to cut off her head. Obviously not every Hells Angel is a killer, rapist or drug pusher, and Marsden and Sher point out that in Britain many have clean police records, though many others do not.

But you judge a man by the company he keeps. And in what sometimes read like bloodsoaked pages, the authors have built a devastating indictment of the gangs' drug-running and racketeering across three continents, and the terrifying methods they use to protect what they see as their territories for drug distribution.

In many ways this is a fascinating and disturbing study of a group of macho outsiders in the modern world, men who treat their often drugaddicted and frightened women with violent derision, and who protect their turf like medieval robber barons.

There is, however, something missing. While I can understand that many gang members tend to be low-income psychopathic failures who live just for the moment, be it sex, booze, drugs or violence, I would have appreciated a chapter on how the Angels see themselves.

What is it that makes a man want to become an outlaw, to be seen as 'the worst of the worst', as one American policeman describes them.

That being said, there is a terrific movie just waiting to be made out of this book, in the story of the undercover cops who took their lives in their hands by becoming Hells Angels, to try to find out who was pulling the strings.

Whether it will ever get made is difficult to say. Is Hollywood ready yet for a movie that destroys once and for all the stupid, romantic myth of the all-American Hells Angels? I'm not so sure.