Angels of Death:
Inside the Bikers' Global
Crime Empire
By William Marsden
and Julian Sher
Knopf Canada, 464 pages, $34.95
'They had not planned on beheading her." With this chilling introduction to the 2001 murder of Cynthia Garcia, whose bloated remains were found in the Arizona desert, Angels of Death becomes a razor-edged ride to the core of evil and back.
By her biker murderer's own brusque assessment, Garcia was "a nobody, a loser." Yet her tawdry death became an integral element of a perversely glamorous mystique which, according to William Marsden and Julian Sher, continues to make the Hells Angels the world's most powerful and feared motorcycle club.
Angels of Death is as contemporary as it gets. Its most recent case studies are scarcely weeks old; its intense analysis of this evil empire as current and finely tuned as a newly minted Harley chopper.
The narrative is multilayered and global in scope, ranging from the Australian desert to the Canadian Rockies, from the canals of Amsterdam to the seamy side of San Bernardino, Calif., where the club was formed in 1948, its unifying symbol the Death Head patch framed inside a set of angelic wings.
Contemporary globalization has been driven, for the most part, by the U.S. corporation and the Yankee greenback. It is only natural that the cultural tremor caused by the Angels, that most viscerally American criminal society, would likewise reverberate around the world. The Angels have given European followers stature, power and wealth in a corporate invasion that has rewarded them with global reach and appetite.
But this is no ordinary business expansion. Hells Angels Motorcycle Club Inc. is involved in hostile takeovers that would make Bay Street's toughest quake at the knees and press the panic button.
Whether exacting revenge in the Australian Outback by blowing up entire towns, hacking opponents to death with axes at British rock-and-roll reunions, or engaging in wild-west shootouts with rivals at Harrah's Nevada Casino, the Hells Angels have shown that they dare to go where mere devils fear to tread.
According to the authors, North American police agencies have long appreciated the war footing that such black-hearted arrogance brings. Yet the New Europe appears blithely ignorant of the Angels, seeing the evil they espouse as a perverse thrill to be enjoyed as a coquettish voyeur, without personal cost.
"The Dutch thought they knew better," Marsden and Sher write. "To them, outlaw bikers were simply a quirky American subculture. If other countries followed Holland's policy of tolerance and acceptance [they thought] the world would be a better place." In a country where courts order an armed robber to reimburse the 6,600 euros he stole from a bank, minus the 2,000 euros he paid for his gun, such specious logic might make sense, but the harsh reality is far more damning.
The Hells Angel clubhouse in Amsterdam was fully funded by tax dollars to promote charity events, motorcycle riding and youth activities. By the time it was a completed fortress -- where rape was commonplace and hard drugs the norm -- it was too late for the denizens of that liberal city to change their minds and retake the bastion.
By 2003, Schiphol Airport had become the European gateway for Colombian cocaine trans-shipped by Hells Angels through Dutch Curacao. When authorities began checking all flights from Curacao, they arrested so many people that prisons couldn't hold them. Most were set free, their drugs confiscated.
Amsterdam's red-light district is infamous for its violence, and in one notable case, for the death and dismemberment of a woman. Her file would be dubbed Operation Annoyance by callous detectives, who were too indifferent to identify the mutilated remains -- until the case was taken up by a crusading Dutch reporter, who made public the fact that she had been murdered by Angels and her body parts fed to pigs. The Dutch statute of limitations on murder, 18 years, ran out before the Angel suspect could be convicted.
The rest of Europe is also cruising in blissful auto-glide as it relates to bike gangs. In Sweden, bikers stole 16 antitank weapons and hundreds of grenades from unguarded militia depots. Machine gun battles broke out in Oslo and Copenhagen. Rocket attacks destroyed biker hangouts in Helsinki. In England, the Angels led the Queen's 50th Jubilee Parade, and the minister of state for policing personally led a Hells Angel "Toy Run for Charity."
Angels of Death has a real-life hero, Jay Dobyns, a towering, former star receiver for the University of Arizona Wildcats, who joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in search of excitement. This he surely got. Shot in the back in his rookie week, before he drew his first paycheque, then catapulted through the air by a bandit's fleeing car a few weeks later, Dobyns survived and thought he was ready to take on the Angels.
His efforts and successes are chronicled in gut-wrenching detail. His journey into the Valley of Death is a modern-day odyssey on which few of us would venture forth. A chess match with Satan. As Dobyns says,with the blunt eloquence of a warrior, "When you walk into their territory and the door locks behind you, you're all alone. Cop or no cop badge, there is no cavalry coming to save you . . . it's just you and a bunch of bikers and no one else."
The undercover agents in Angels of Death are not neophytes. Their backstop is letter perfect: aliases, alibis, able support in the form of 007-style technology. And they truly need it, for the Angels portrayed in this work have the means and the will to corrupt judges, politicians and police.
Canada does not escape well-justified criticism on this score. The Quebec biker wars of a decade ago, which claimed 150 lives, are searingly recounted, and should have marked a national watershed.
Yet many Canadians are in denial about the true nature of organized crime. British Columbia has an illicit marijuana cash crop worth $2.5-billion annually, with B.C. pot 10 to 15 times as potent as that hippies smoked in the 1960s. Contrary to current popular opinion, legalizing pot does not alter the harsh lessons of the Dutch experience: The Angels have muscled their way into control of Amsterdam's "legitimate" market. Cancer cannot be treated by benign neglect or by turning a blind eye.
Read this tome carefully, dear reader, and never, ever, let your guard down. The veneer of civilization runs very thin, and the Trojan horse at our gates looks disturbingly like a Harley chopper.
K. G. E. (Chuck) Konkel is a serving Canadian police officer and an expert on organized crime. He has written two thrillers set in Hong Kong and Mexico, and is completing a third, set in Berlin in 1945.