THREE FOR THOUGHT WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ABOUT . . . BIKERS
Angels are hell
As the mass Bandidos slaying shows, says JULIAN SHER, there's nothing
heroic about outlaw motorcycle gangs
JULIAN SHER
15/04/06
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060415.BKREAD15/TPStory/Entertainment
The grisly slaying of eight members of the notorious Bandidos gang in
a small Ontario town last weekend thrust the dark netherworld of
bikers into the glare of TV cameras and onto the front pages of
newspapers. For many Canadians it was an eye-opening shocker.
For me, it brought back memories of an equally disturbing scene from
my recent biker investigations. I was standing in a patch of desert
outside Phoenix with two police officers as they pointed out where a
woman named Cynthia Garcia had been left to die, stabbed more than 40
times for daring to talk back to Hells Angels in their clubhouse. One
of her killers -- who eventually squealed to the police and turned in
his alleged accomplices -- remembered how, with her life and blood
draining out of her, she grasped his pant leg and then collapsed.
Garcia's murder and the execution of the eight bikers in Sheddon,
Ont., represent the true face of the outlaw biker world. There are
plenty of good journalistic accounts of that world, but for a real
flavour of the biker mindset, nothing beats the first-person
revelations of the bikers themselves and the cops who take them on.
Sonny Barger is the world's most famous outlaw biker, the iconic
leader of the Hells Angels since the 1950s who now hawks his books,
beer and biker clothing on the Internet. His autobiography -- Hell's
Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels
Motorcycle Club (Perennial, 2001) -- is read by his many fans as the
bible of Bikerdom. But the discerning reader can see it is also one of
the most startling confessions of what really lurks in the heart of an
Angel. "We were like the Crusaders and Genghis Khan and the Jesse
James gang all rolled into one," Barger boasts. "The seventies were a
gangster era for us," he admits. "I sold drugs and got into a lot of
shit."
Barger blandly recounts how, when one small-time rival gang was
foolish enough to steal his bike by mistake, the Angels dragged the
culprits to his house for a brutal torture session. Barger and his
boys bullwhipped their hapless victims, beat them with spiked dog
collars and broke their fingers with ball-peen hammers.
On women, Barger -- who usually gets the kind of uncritical, fawning
media coverage reserved for rock stars -- says bluntly: "Can't live
without them, can't use their bones for soup." He recounts joyfully
about sending out his minions for "a scavenger hunt for pussy." If
they brought back "a really good chick," the biker leader explains,
chances are he'd keep her for an extra week before passing her around.
The flip side of the biker world comes from William Queen, an
undercover agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF), who recounts his 28-month infiltration of the fearsome Mongols
biker gang in Under and Alone (Random House, 2005).
In his harrowing account, Queen rides with the Mongols, witnesses them
trafficking drugs, carrying out beatings and plotting murder. He gets
to the edge and almost falls off the precipice that so many undercover
agents face, becoming so close to his band of biker brothers he fears
he will lose his real cop soul. He knew these were "serious bad guys
who needed to be prosecuted and put away," but he "felt and understood
the bond holding together" these outlaws.
Eventually, 51 Mongols were arrested, but Queen hardly emerged
unscathed. I spent many hours with Queen's handler -- an experienced
ATF case agent named John Ciccone -- and the lessons police learned
from Queen's penetration would help the ATF build better and more
massive investigations against the bikers, including the murder of
Cynthia Garcia.
Sometimes fiction can capture the real-life horrors of biker crime as
well -- if not better -- than non-fiction. Giles Blunt has always been
one of my favourite mystery authors, so I was thrilled to meet him at
a Crime Writers of Canada awards dinner last year. We laughed at the
irony of how fiction writers are pleased when their work is hailed as
being "ripped from the headlines," while true-crime journalists are
honoured when reviewers compliment their books for reading "like a
crime novel."
Blunt pulls off both headline-grabbing accuracy and crime-novel
moodiness in his excellent series featuring Detective John Cardinal in
the fictional town of Algonquin Bay, Ont. Blunt grew up in North Bay,
Ont., and it shows.
His latest book, Black Fly Season (Random House, 2005), has eerie
similarities to the slaying of the Bandidos. It features Walter
(Wombat) Guthrie, a crazed member of the Viking Riders, who "used to
get their dope from Montreal" until "they made the mistake of
disagreeing with the Hells Angels," Blunt's detective discovers.
Wombat, who lives in the basement of a former farmhouse, turns up dead
and badly mutilated; his limbs and head are severed, and only his
tattoos give him away.
Cardinal's investigation leads him to citizens who fall for the rebel
image of the bikers -- "Doesn't everybody think they are heroes?" one
woman asks -- to naive cops who underestimate the danger they pose. A
drug rip-off leads to more torture and death in an isolated rural
cabin, and more bodies pile up until our hero nails the shadowy biker
leader.
It's a spooky, scary peek into the bloody world of biker madness that
all of Canada saw last week when those eight corpses turned up at the
edge of a cornfield.
Real bodies. Real bullets. Real blood. That's the true story of the
bikers.
Julian Sher, a Montreal investigative journalist, is the co-author of
the just-published Angels of Death: Inside the Biker Gangs' Global
Crime Empire, and the national bestseller The Road to Hell: How the
Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada.
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