TORONTO STAR

“ANGELS OF DEATH”
Biker gangs go global
A Montreal pair tracks the bikers' trail abroad to produce an action-packed read, finds Jerry Langton

APRIL 23 2006

When a book begins with the phrase "they had not planned on beheading her," you have every right to expect to be taken on a long and interesting ride. That's just what you get with Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire by William Marsden and Julian Sher. In it, the Montreal-based journalists track the worldwide phenomenon of motorcycle gangs - and the trouble, the violence and the overall unease their presence brings.

More to the authors' credit, they also show readers how motorcycle gangs start, how they operate and how they almost invariably evolve into organized crime. They manage to do all this with writing that is fast-paced, at times thrilling and never boring - altogether, a remarkable accomplishment.

From cover to cover, Angels of Death is filled with an encyclopedic amount of biker world detail. I know from my own labours that getting the straight story about bikers isn't easy. There's no shortage of people who want to tell their story or give their opinion - although few actual full-patch members have been inclined to speak to the press since Marsden and Sher published The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada in 2002.

What usually happens is that people close to the situation - lesser bikers, their friends, associates, lawyers and family - speak at length, but they always have an agenda or an imagination hitched to what they consider loyalty, if not fealty, to the glorious allure of the biker fraternity. The quest for the real story becomes something of a murder mystery in reverse, trying to find the most plausible explanation supported by what you know, or at least accept, as true. Marsden and Sher do this expertly, managing to separate the lies, the obvious spin and mythology from the real story.

The police always want to talk. But just as most bikers promote the notion that they're nothing more than a bunch of fun-loving rascals, many officers paint all bikers as psychotic criminals. Yet when Marsden and Sher do quote police, it is most often those few officers who have managed to infiltrate the gangs and testify as to what it is really like on the inside. Those officers, often with the memories of bikers' bullets, knives, chains or fists still fresh in their minds, tell stories of exceptional brutality. They also expose an interior biker world that is constantly paranoid, relentlessly juvenile, surprisingly petty and even darkly funny.

Much of the book is dedicated to the remarkable global expansion of the biker gangs, particularly the Hells Angels, but also that of lesser organizations.

The stories are almost invariably the same: Motorcycle clubs spring up out of collected groups of bored young men; they don leather and insignia designed to frighten their neighbours; they realize that trafficking drugs and other vices can help pay for their club and a better lifestyle - then they are recruited by a bigger club and must fight or join. The biker gangs' various national histories would be monotonous if they weren't told so deftly and with such an array of graphic, often shocking, detail. Canadian readers will be relieved to find out that Marsden and Sher retell the history of this country's bikers in a new, updated way, so page-skipping isn't an option. Marsden and Sher not only identify the men most responsible for the bikers' rise in each country (like Hamilton's Walter Stadnick in Canada, Sonny Barger in the U.S., Peter John Hill in Australia) but provide enough biography to make them rounded characters. While the authors refuse to lionize these men, they do reveal the intelligence, charisma and strategic thinking required to enforce strict discipline on what are generally the unruliest members of society.

These tales of bikers selling drugs, terrorizing small towns and sometimes shooting it out when their territories overlap would probably be interesting enough, but the authors go much further. They describe the settings and culture and people of each place the bikers ("bikies" in Australia) emerge or invade. Differences become not only apparent, but also logical.

While the old guard is dominant in such places as Canada and Scandinavia, it is waning in other areas, largely because of a culture and philosophy that may be too dated for many young men. The Hells Angels and their white-members-only rule are being chased out of their original home of Southern California by the tougher and more numerous Mongols, who have actively recruited Hispanic youths for years.

Angels of Death is a marked improvement on the authors' previous The Road to Hell, with improvements in detail, style and overall readability. Sometimes the richness of detail is almost too much; characters, situations and events were introduced in such a rapid-fire way that I found it necessary to reread sentences or whole paragraphs just to reorient myself.

But that's the strength of Angels of Death - there's so much fascinating information you won't want to miss any of it.

Toronto journalist Jerry Langton is the author of Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick in the Canadian Hells Angels (Wiley).