The Vancouver Province
July 30, 2006
Angels truly a hellish gang:
New book is a catalogue of atrocities against innocent
Elaine O'Connor, The Province
They had not planned on beheading her.
The opening line of Canadian journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden's new book on the Hells Angels serves as a warning to readers: We're not in Canada anymore.
In their first biker book, Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada, Sher and Marsden set out to show that the Hells Angels are more than just a club of biker buddies -- that they are in fact a gang of hardened criminals who run drugs, launder money and murder rivals.
In their follow-up, Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire, the authors aim to reveal that many members are more than street criminals and are really cold-blooded killers who maim women, dismember innocents and slice the throats of five-year-olds.
It makes for a chilling read.
One of the aims of the book, Sher told The Province in an interview, was "to say the murders and killings and violence that we've seen in Canada didn't just fall from the sky. That they came out of a particular breed and culture.
"There were some quite horrific stories of innocent victims and it was important to show that. Because to some degree, British Columbia so far has been spared what we saw in Quebec, even what we saw in Winnipeg with drive-by shootings," he said, citing deaths of innocents in other provinces.
Since they were founded by California outlaw Sonny Barger in 1957, the Hells have spawned a motorcycle-gang empire with an estimated 2,500 full-patch members in 25 countries.
In Canada, the Hells have grown from one chapter in 1977 to 37 chapters by 2002.
Road to Hell took readers into Canadian clubhouses, inside police investigations, and into the mind of biker informant Dany Kane. The focus was the brazenness of the Hells' expansion and business dealings: we saw them renting conference rooms at the Days Inn, buying homes down the street from police, plotting drug deals and hits in family diners. Civilian casualties -- notably Montreal prison guard Diane Lavigne and 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, slain by a 1995 Hells car bomb -- were few.
Angels of Death presents this human carnage as a deliberate scare tactic. As it scans the rise of the Hells in the U.S., Australia, England, Europe, Canada and Scandinavia, it reveals virtually every state and country with a Hells chapter has its own Daniel or Diane.
There is Cynthia Garcia, the 44-year-old Arizona single mom lured to a clubhouse only to be abused, gutted, almost decapitated and dumped in a desert in 2001.
There is Joanne Wilson, a 24-year-old hotel maid in Amsterdam who started dating a Hells member and ended up a torso found floating down a city canal in 1985.
And there is Dallas Grondalski, a blond, blue-eyed five-year-old who was slashed at the throat and then shot in the head in her Northern California home by Hells in 1986 after they finished slaying her mother, stepbrother and father, a former member who tried to leave the club.
"By telling the story of Cynthia Garcia, of Dallas Grondalski and the young girl in Holland, Joanne Wilson," Sher said, "we wanted to bring it home that no one is really immune to them."
Angels of Death brings the danger of the Hells Angels home so forcefully it should come with an R rating. It's a brutal, bloody, revolting book -- and riveting.