'IT'S THE ONE THING THE HELLS ANGELS FEAR

The law may have finally figured out how to bring down the notorious
gang, which evolved from a small group of bikers 60 years ago into a
global criminal empire. Tim Shufelt reports.

"We can't be infiltrated, no cops can get inside on us, they don't
have the resources, the manpower, or the time to wait. We're
unbeatable and untouchable." -- Sonny Barger, Hells Angels kingpin,
quoted in the 2007 book Running with the Devil, by Kerrie Droban.

For police, the hardest thing to stomach was that Sonny Barger was
telling the truth. The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was untouchable by
law enforcement and invulnerable to informants and undercover agents.

Mr. Barger is the world's best known biker -- the American legend who
founded the Hells
Angels' feared Oakland chapter in 1957, the surly bad ass who
threatened to kill Keith
Richards if he did not keep playing after violence broke out at a
doomed Rolling Stones
concert in 1969, the central renegade in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's
Angels: The Strange
and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, and the clever
entrepreneur who built
a small band of thugs into a global empire of the underworld.

For years, he backed up his claim that the gang could not be
infiltrated with bulletproof security. New chapters sprouted in cities
around the world, with most adopting the onerous recruitment process
and code of secrecy that kept the Angels' inner circles sheltered from
police.

Law enforcement could not get the access it needed to build evidence
of Angels involvement in drug trafficking, prostitution, illegal
weapons and violence.

But while the world's most notorious biker gang celebrates its 60th
anniversary this week, it is reeling from a series of recent
successful police operations, particularly in Canada, where the Hells
Angels' supremacy among bikers is virtually unchallenged.

Armed with recent federal anti-gang legislation and evidence gathered
by undercover agents and the rare co-operation of full-patch Hells
Angels, Canadian police and prosecutors are striking at the heart of
the gang's confidence in the loyalty among brothers.

"Up to now, when you had that patch on your back, internationally,
every criminal knew you were a righteous bad guy. You weren't an
informant. They just knew the Angels do not have informants. That was
something they didn't have to worry about. Now, just because you're an
Angel doesn't mean you're not an informant," says Insp. Gary
Shinkaruk, head of the RCMP's outlaw motorcycle gang unit in B.C. "Now
you can see a lot of turmoil."

Not that being sent to jail is a big deal for most bearers of the
death's-head patch. In fact, doing time is almost a point of pride.
But the odds of getting arrested are rising in Canada for the Hells
Angels, which has already been declared a criminal organization in
court cases in Quebec and Ontario.

Next week, a B.C. Supreme Court judge will decide whether three
members of the East End Hells Angels chapter facing cocaine
trafficking charges were acting as a "joint venture" on behalf of the
chapter. A conviction under the anti-gang legislation could mean
longer prison terms and serious disruptions to the Angels' operations,
both legitimate and illicit. That's got the fearless Hells Angels
nervous, Insp. Shinkaruk says. And not just in B.C.

A "criminal organization" declaration could resonate through Canada
and other countries home to the Red and White. While the relatively
untested legislation is now difficult to prove in court, a conviction
could carry weight in future cases. And some European countries have
laws automatically criminalizing an organization that has already been
blacklisted by three other countries, Insp. Shinkaruk says.

"It's the one thing the Hells Angels fear the most," says Julian Sher,
investigative journalist and co-author of Angels of Death and The Road
to Hell. "They lost that battle in Quebec, they lost that battle in
Ontario and now they're facing the battle of their lives in British
Columbia." Both books are national bestsellers and Mr. Sher is
recognized as an expert on biker gangs.

The Hells Angels have always maintained that they are mostly
law-abiding and should not be punished collectively for the misdeeds
of a few bad apples.

The club was founded in Fontana, California, in March 1948, taking its
name from a crew of American B-17 bombers in the Second World War, who
adopted the name from a 1930 Howard Hughes movie.

It wasn't until Sonny Barger and the Oakland chapter entered the scene
that the Angels gained attention and notoriety as an inextricable part
of the 1960s counterculture in California.

The Angels then presided over the event said to mark the end of that
turbulent decade: the free Rolling Stones' concert at the Altamont
Speedway in northern California on Dec. 6, 1969. A restless crowd
clashed with the bikers, and 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed
to death by a member of the Hells Angels after pulling a gun near the
stage.

Ever since, the Hells Angels have been expanding with new chapters in
the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa and South America.

All the while, the Hells Angels have conducted a global PR campaign
portraying themselves as motorcycle enthusiasts, cowboys for a new
generation and even defenders of democratic values.

The gang incorporated in North America, trademarked its brand and set
up chapter websites hawking clothes and merchandise to legions of
supporters. It organized rides to raise money for charity and
appointed spokesmen to deal with media.

At the same time, it continued to wreak its unique brand of havoc:
trafficking drugs around the world, muscling in on street criminals
and drug dealers and waging war with rival bikers. To at once project
those two conflicting public images, what Mr. Sher calls a "Madison
Avenue dream," and the vision of Sonny Barger, is unprecedented in
organized crime.

"The Mafia doesn't hold press conferences," Mr. Sher says. "And the
Triad doesn't have websites where you can buy stickers and support
T-shirts. The Hells Angels has by far the most sophisticated PR
campaign of any criminal gang in the world. It's absolutely brilliant.
And, overall, it works."

The Angels organization has always scoffed at its treatment in the
media. "The way we were depicted, we were like Vikings on acid, raping
our way across sunny California on motorcycles forged in the furnaces
of hell," Mr. Barger wrote in his autobiography.

In many of the 30 countries with Angels chapters, the bikers are
regarded somewhere between mischievous rascals and mythological
knights of the road. And despite ever more sophisticated police
outfits dedicated to reining them in, the club's size remains steady
at about 3,000 members in more than 250 chapters worldwide, according
to Sgt. Eric Dupre, a national intelligence officer with Criminal
Intelligence Service Canada, a government agency established in 1970
that facilitates the production and exchange of criminal information
and intelligence within the law enforcement community.

Similarly, the Hells Angels in Canada have kept their numbers
afterlarge arrest sweeps in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C., and the
collapse of chapters in Halifax and Thunder Bay.

With about 460 full-patch members in 35 chapters, the monopoly the
Hells Angels enjoys in Canada is unrivalled in any other country.
"This country is strictly red and white," Sgt. Dupre says.

The Outlaws are down to just a couple of chapters, and the Bandidos
were virtually wiped out after the murders of eight members in
Shedden, Ont., in 2006. Six full-patch members of the Bandidos and two
associates ranging in age from 28 to 52 were shot and their bodies
dumped in a farmer's field. Police called the massacre an "internal
cleansing" within the gang.

Of course, law enforcement in Canada is unmoved by claims that Hells
Angels members are unfairly targeted. Neither does the Canadian public
subscribe to the Angels' gentler constitution, Mr. Sher says. "In
Canada, it is widely accepted by a great number of people that they
are criminals."

The biker wars in Quebec went a long way in swaying public opinion
against motorcycle gangs. From 1994 until 2002, the Hells Angels, led
by Maurice "Mom" Boucher, battled Rock Machine bikers for control of
the provincial drug market. Each side waged bloody campaigns that left
more than 160 dead, including 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, who was
killed by shrapnel from a bomb planted in a Jeep outside a biker
hangout in east-end Montreal in 1995.

Any pretense that the Hells Angels is a harmless brotherhood is
shattered by a "simple check with the court cases across the country,"
says Michel Auger, the former Le Journal de Montreal crime reporter
who survived being shot in the back six times in the paper's parking
lot on Sept. 13, 2000, the day after he ran a story on the latest
round of murders.

"Canadians should be thankful to the Hells Angels of Quebec," Mr.
Auger says. "Because of the foolishness of the Hells Angels in Quebec
in the '80s, Parliament acted to get tougher laws against organized
crime," Mr. Auger said.

Also, biker police in Canada got more determined. They realized the
only way to take down outlaw bikers was through infiltration -- an
expensive, lengthy and dangerous enterprise. "That's always been one
of the biggest challenges we've had. Just the way they operate
criminally, getting into that inner sanctum, getting into those secret
meetings and getting into the places no one else can, that's really
what you need to do," says

Insp. Shinkaruk. "Having an inside person is just paramount."

Traditionally, police have been unable to overcome the group's
military-like recruitment process, which is designed to weed out the
weak or disloyal and establish layers of security.

Becoming a full-patch member can take up to seven years, involving
several phases of membership and varying levels of subservience to
full chapter members, Insp. Shinkaruk says.

But nowhere in the world have police been so successful at
infiltrating the Hells Angels as in Canada. In March 2001, police in
Quebec arrested 138 bikers, including the entire Quebec Hells Angels
Nomads chapter in Operation Springtime, which involved planting two
police agents in the Angels-controlled Rockers gang.

In Ontario, Project Tandem resulted in the arrest of 15 Hells Angels
on drug, weapons and murder charges in September 2006. And last April,
16 full-patch members were arrested in Project Develop after police
conducted dozens of raids and seized the Toronto chapter's clubhouse,
$500,000 in cash, 80 weapons, including rifles and shotguns, more than
nine kilograms of cocaine, and almost 500 litres of concentrated GHB,
the date-rape drug. In both investigations, police had the help of
full-patch members.

And the current Hells Angels trial in B.C. is a result of Project
E-Pandora, in which the RCMP paid a Hells Angels enforcer $1 million
to help collect evidence against the East End chapter.

Drawing on federal legislation passed in 2001 that defines a criminal
organization as three or more people benefiting from serious offences,
prosecutors in that trial aimed to prove the Hells Angels chapter as a
whole gained from the alleged offences. But a conviction will not
permanently blemish the Hells Angels patch in B.C. It has to be proven
in court with each new trial.

But it would carry stiffer penalties for the accused, would allow
police to more easily seize Hells Angels assets or prevent them from
operating legitimate businesses, and would give law enforcement more
discretion in putting Hells Angels under surveillance.

It may also cause tension within Angels' ranks. Members are under
strict orders not to plead guilty to any "criminal organization"
charges, Insp. Shinkaruk says. Members who run afoul of the law will
more and more have to draw on chapter funds to pay for expensive legal
defences.

And when you add the psychological blow of having been infiltrated by
police, there is the potential for some serious rifts among members,
he adds. Angels may be less likely to trust their full-patch brothers
automatically, or take on new members. And their partners in criminal
circles may be less likely to trust the Hells Angels for fear of
dealing with informants.

The toll is also being felt by law enforcement, however, says Sgt.
Dupre. "That's a fault of the judicial system itself. The cases are
getting so large, so complex, difficult and costly to try. And at the
end of the day, law enforcement can only do so many projects at a time."

Of course, the Hells Angels aren't taking this onslaught lying down.
The co-accused and their lawyers vigorously defended against the
criminal organization label. And if it doesn't go their way, the
Angels will learn from it.

"They do their homework," Insp. Shinkaruk says. "Every prosecution we
have, they do an excellent job of sharing information, both nationally
and internationally. So it's hard to catch them twice the same way."

All of this comes during a period of transition for the Hells Angels.
Like many organizations, the leadership is showing its age,
particularly in the United States. Mr. Barger is 69 years old and,
though he is no longer president of the Oakland chapter, many other
leaders are not far behind him in age.

"We're seeing a generational gap within the Hells Angels," Mr. Sher
says. "In California in particular, the older guys don't want to fight
as much. They've been to jail. They now have their mansions. They now
have a mortgage to pay and wives and children to support. And they
don't want to go back to jail. They've done their time and they're
living high off the hog now."

That reluctance doesn't sit well with new young members eager to reap
the rewards of the patch they worked so hard to earn, Mr. Sher says.
And it's leaving them vulnerable to threats from rival biker gangs,
particularly the Mongols, a California-based biker gang made up mostly
of younger Mexican-Americans known for drawing new recruits from
street gangs.

But the Hells Angels has also shown a remarkable ability to adapt and
survive, like any resilient corporation. Not eager to replay the
carnage in Quebec, for example, the Hells Angels moved into Ontario in
2000 by swallowing up several smaller motorcycle gangs in a massive
"patch-over."

And law enforcement harbours no delusions of ever ridding Canada of
the biker gang. "What they want is to marginalize the Hells Angels.
It's the difference between Mom Boucher being on the front page as
almost a folk hero, and the Angels being able to walk with impunity
into any bar and terrorize a city, or being marginalized as the
criminals that they are," Mr. Sher explains.

"Sonny Barger is proud of saying the sun will never set on a Hells
Angels patch. And he's right."

Tim Shufelt is a writer at the Ottawa Citizen.