The evil reputation of Hells Angels is well-deserved

John Preston
 The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
June 4, 2006

Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire
WILLIAM MARSDEN & JULIAN SHER

In his first book, Hell's Angels, published in 1966, the late Hunter S. Thompson wrote, 'despite everything the psychiatrists and Freudian casuists have to say about them, they are tough, mean and potentially as dangerous as a pack of wild boar'. Forty years on, William Marsden and Julian Sher come to much the same conclusion, albeit with a lot less fizz in their prose style. But in that time the Hell's Angels' public image has gone through a remarkable transformation. During the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, they even rode down the Mall on their Harleys, waving happily to the crowd. Yet behind this mask of homely satanism, something very nasty is going on - principally drug trafficking on a global scale, but also gun-running, extortion, loan-sharking and murder.

The man responsible for giving the Angels their new user-friendly sheen is Ralph 'Sonny' Barger, the now-legendary patriarch of the organisation and the same man who dismissed Hunter Thompson as 'a real weenie' all those years ago. These days Sonny may be feeling the pace - he's in his sixties and talks in a wheezy mechanical croak after a bout of throat cancer - but his influence remains as strong as ever. Having given the Angels a hierarchical structure and a respect for their uniform that would be the envy of Sandhurst, he has set them loose on an absurdly acquiescent world and reaped the profits.

The great turning-point in their financial fortunes came in the early 1980s when the Angels discovered how to make methamphetamine - speed - both cheaply and efficiently. The recipe, written on a single sheet of paper, was passed reverently from chapter to chapter, from country to country. While the Angels may have turned into a tribe of paranoid zombies as a result of sampling their own wares, they had stumbled upon what was effectively a licence to print money. In Australia, one group of industrious Angels was making 5.5 kilos of pure methamphetamine every 24 hours, thus giving them a daily profit of $100,000.

Most of Marsden and Sher's book is taken up with tracing police attempts to infiltrate the Angels and thereby destroy them from the inside - a tactic which has produced some notable successes without ever delivering anything approaching a knock-out blow. It ought to make for riveting reading, but alas it doesn't. This is due mainly to the fact that the authors possess little or no ability to make their material come to life. They're thorough, all right - dauntingly so - but as one minutely detailed bust follows another, even the most attentive reader is likely to feel in need of a little dose of speed to keep them going.

Despite their exotic nicknames - 'Snot' Reid, Roger 'Root Rat' Biddlestone and the marvellously titled 'Vague Steven' - the Angels themselves are a uniformly bovine lot. These are people whose vocabulary consists - not predominantly, but exclusively in several cases - of the words 'dude' and 'motherf---er'. Unfortunately, the police are no better, being stiff, self-righteous and having little to distinguish one from another.

Even so, amid the slew of numbskull depravity, one or two moments do stand out. I liked the story of the Australian policeman who appeared on television accusing the Hell's Angels of involvement in drug-dealing. Greatly affronted, the Angels sued him for defamation of character - at least they tried to until their lawyer gently broke it to them that in legal terms they had no character to defame.

My favourite bit, though, was the dreadful fate suffered by Barger's heir-apparent, George Christie. Having escaped conviction on a murder charge, Christie's darkest day came when his son announced that he didn't want to be a Hell's Angel as his daddy had intended - he planned to go into haute cuisine instead. As he watched his boy saunter off into the sunset in his chef's hat, a tearful Christie admitted, 'I tried to talk him out of it. Maybe some day he'll come back... The door is open.'