Vancouver Sun
May 13, 2006

Reminders of a vicious subculture:
Biker gangs scare us -- perhaps more than they should

By Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun

ANGELS OF DEATH
Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire
By William Marsden and Julian Sher

THE BIKER TRIALS
Bringing Down the Hells Angels
By Paul Cherry

ANGELS, MOBSTERS AND NARCO-TERRORISTS
By Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe

Eight men dead stuffed into the trunks of cars abandoned in an Ontario field.

In Prince George, a man has his hands tied to the steering wheel of his truck. He is forced to watch his dream house go up in flames and then he is shot.

A middle-aged man is cold-bloodedly executed in his Vancouver home while, across town, a twentysomething gets clipped on a dance floor in a packed nightclub, dead from a shot to the head.

Yes, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre may live in infamy, but organized criminals and their penchant for rage-fuelled violence and bloodthirsty retribution remain with us.

Dubya has those pesky terrorists in his sights, but the rest of us are probably more focused on the rock-cocaine dealer on the corner, the shooting gallery down the street, the strong-arming of the local grocer and the burgeoning body count in every major city, thanks to the drug trade.

And now I hear a chorus of authors singing. On my desk I count more than a handful of current non-fiction titles dealing with racketeering, gangsterism and motorcycle hoodlums. My shelves groan with many, many more.

I appreciate the menace such organized and dangerous muscle poses to the public. I cover too many trials involving real bad guys not to understand.

I didn't think, however, that much more could be written about the Hells Angels after Hunter S. Thompson got stomped for his troubles and, a quarter-century later, Yves Lavigne, a former colleague at the Globe and Mail, pulled his well-researched updates on the leather-clad hellions from the sleeve of his black T-shirt.

I was wrong. There would appear to be an insatiable appetite for another savage, crank-snorting trip with the volatile riders of the winged death's head -- or any other vicious subculture that exploits society.

Certainly, times have changed. Starting in the 1970s, the United States' War on Drugs turned the illicit narcotics market into a cash cow for crooks and terrorists alike, jacking up black-market risk premiums and concomitantly boosting profits to phenomenal levels.

The Angels were among the biggest winners: The money fuelled their expansion.

Following up their earlier bestseller, The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada, William Marsden and Julian Sher provide an informative, well-written expose of the Angels' route to international power and prosperity -- a path paved with terror and blood. These two Montreal journalists are real pros and their book, Angels of Death, is a well-crafted, well-paced, broad and sweeping narrative.

They detail how a motley crew of outcasts, felons, rebels and disaffected military veterans became a sophisticated organization producing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits. Although the gang was founded in 1948 by returning servicemen, it was recruits such as Sonny Barger, who joined in the late 1950s and '60s, who drove the club deep into the subterranean world of crime.

With great joie de vivre, Marsden and Sher paint a hellish-hued mural of representative situations, providing a portrait of these motorcycle outlaws: murder and mayhem in Australia, decapitation and dismemberment in Holland, rocket attacks in Denmark and assassinations in Canada.

Paul Cherry's work, The Biker Trials: Bringing Down the Hells Angels, pales significantly by comparison. But then, it's a more circumscribed and specific tale about a particular group of Angels and a particular time in Quebec.

A crime reporter for the Montreal Gazette, Cherry fastidiously identifies the players and sketches the sanguinary clashes throughout the 1990s between the Angels and the so-called Alliance (the combined might of the Rock Machine and other lesser Quebec-based gangs).

It would take more than 2,000 police officers across the country to end the warfare by 2001, with more than 130 arrests, the seizure of assets totalling more than $10 million and the confiscation of some 70 firearms. This is the conflict that made Maurice (Mom) Boucher infamous and eventually led to his downfall.

It's a fascinating tale. Nonetheless, I yearned for more Canadian and more global context. Cherry's view is too narrow.

By comparison, Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe -- a pair of Toronto writers -- are into the big picture and the broad brush-stroke. They wrote Global Mafia: The New World Order of Organized Crime back in 1995. Angels, Mobsters and Narco-Terrorists advances their argument that we have entered a new criminal era, a time in which cartels, syndicates, gangs, terrorist groups and other evil organizations have found sinister common ground.

In their view, the territory of the underworld is no longer geographic; it's financial. The drug trade has funded expansion and diversification for all and, in the process, provided a catalyst for cooperation and common purpose -- namely, profit.

Nicaso and Lamothe see criminal empires and dictators as all part of the same club. And they're out to prod Ottawa into taking these issues more seriously because they believe Canada practises organized-crime control with the mind of an accountant.

"With its lacklustre legislation and lip service to commitment in the fight against organized crime ... with its loose border and liberal immigration and justice policies, [Canada] is a prime base for the world's criminal organizations," they conclude.

Although I'm empathetic, I find, in this work and in the genre in general, a relentless urging toward panic and paranoia that should be taken with a good dose of sodium chloride.

Yes, the Angels and other merciless gangsters in our midst are involved in murder, bombing, drug trafficking, money-laundering, prostitution, human smuggling, arms dealing and more, but it's important to keep the danger in perspective.

There are perhaps only 2,500 full-patch Angels in 25 countries -- about 500 in Canada. They are certainly one of the largest organized groups of concern to law enforcement.

Yet although they are feared and violent underworld players, I suggest they could be rounded up by the authorities in the blink of an eye. There are a lot of bad people out there -- the Triads, the Russian Mob, the Mafia, the Big Circle Boys, the Angels, the Banditos -- but we are not facing a crisis, in my opinion.

Yes, there is much to do: Challenges are posed by new technologies, modern travel, porous borders and the prohibition of drugs that has helped to finance organized crime. These books are each a good reminder of that.

But remember, too, governments are listening to these concerns and responding. B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal this week said Victoria would join the new Conservative government in Ottawa by committing more money to law enforcement to combat organized crime.

And, lest we forget, the heirs of Eliot Ness win far more than they lose.