B.C.'S HELLS ANGELS: RICH AND POWERFUL

Canada is a haven for the outlaw motorcycle gang, with more members
per capita than any other country. B.C's Angels have mounted an
effective public-relations campaign that portrays them as harmless
motorcycle enthusiasts, but they maintain a fearsome reputation in the
criminal underworld.

The rich and powerful Hells Angels motorcycle club in B.C. -- whose
members largely eluded criminal charges and flew below society's radar
screen for two decades -- are now expanding across the province,
bolstering their multi-million-dollar business network and cementing
their territorial stake on organized crime.

The expansion is partly because they are protecting their turf from
the Bandidos. A rival U.S. outlaw motorcycle gang with deep roots in
neighbouring Washington state, the Bandidos have moved into Alberta
and are threatening to set up shop in B.C.

Last January a Bandidos member was fatally shot outside a strip club
in Edmonton, where the Texas-based motorcycle gang has established a
probationary chapter.

But the Hells Angels expansion is also a savvy business move by a
successful and powerful organization with a legendary reputation that
is growing internationally.

Eight years ago, there were 70 so-called full-patch members and five
chapters in B.C. Today, there are 95 members spread across seven
chapters: Vancouver, East End, Haney, White Rock, Mission, the Nomads
and Nanaimo.

There are also plans for a new Kelowna chapter and there's talk of
another chapter in Surrey, where a so-called shadow support club was
established months ago.

The Renegades, an outlaw motorcycle group in Prince George that has
about a dozen members, is a Hells Angels puppet club.

The Hells Angels, a predominantly white organization, has roughly
2,000 members worldwide, with chapters in Canada, the U.S., Europe,
New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and South America.

Canada has more Hells Angels members per capita than any other
country, including the U.S., where there are chapters in about 20 states.

At the same time as B.C.'s Hells Angels became some of the wealthiest
bikers in the country, they've used a public relations campaign to
establish an image as a harmless club of motorcycle
enthusiasts.

Sure, a few members have criminal records, the club maintains, but any
large organization has people who have run-ins with the law. That
doesn't make them a criminal organization, the Hells Angels say.

But in the criminal underworld, the Hells Angels have a fearsome
reputation.

The trial last year of contract killer Mickie (Phil) Smith heard
evidence that one of Smith's five murder victims was Paul Percy Soluk,
33, who had ripped off Hells Angels marijuana-growing operations.
Smith said he was told by an Asian gangster named Brian, who arranged
the murder, that it was being done for the East End chapter of the
Hells Angels.

Police never found the body of Soluk, who was killed in 1999. Smith, a
56-year-old former life-insurance salesman, confessed to an undercover
officer posing as a crime boss that Soluk was located in a Surrey
crack house and taken to a garage in Surrey, where he was shot.

Smith said a man he called Yurik helped chop up the body and dispose
of it.

"He's not an Angel but he works with the Angels," Smith said of Yurik.
"I know he's done lots of hits."

Police said the Smith case underscores how Hells Angels distance
themselves from crimes that could put them behind bars for life,
instead contracting out to other gangsters -- a marriage of
convenience, of sorts.

So far, Hells Angels in B.C. have avoided the kind of violent and
bloody public turf war that erupted on Montreal streets with the rival
Rock Machine biker gang, which sparked the political will and funding
to target the bikers and prosecute them on charges of murder,
extortion, drug trafficking and making money from prostitution.

Here in B.C., the Hells Angels have operated largely unopposed by
rival biker gangs, allowing them to consolidate operations.

"They are disciplined and well led," said RCMP Insp. Bob Paulson, who
is in charge of major investigations involving outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Although the Angels have a reputation for violence and retaliation,
for the most part B.C. has not seen the deaths of innocent victims
caught in the crossfire, unlike Montreal, where the death of a young
boy outraged the public, who pressured politicians to take action.

"Arguably there are a number of murders attributed to the HA in B.C.,
but they're all kind of within their element . . . there was no
spillover," Paulson said.

But even without the kind of street warfare that erupted in Quebec,
having the Hells Angels spread across B.C. is expected to create
spinoff effects from increased underworld activity, including rising
insurance rates to cover damage caused by marijuana-growing operations
in houses.

The huge profits reaped from the drug trade, police say, have been
used by Hells Angels to establish legitimate businesses ranging from
trucking firms and retail cellular-phone outlets to travel agencies,
coffee bars and hip clothing stores.

Members of the public generally do not know they are frequenting
businesses owned by Hells Angels members, since police chose for years
not to publicize that information.

And many Hells Angels use nominees -- trusted associates who register
companies in their names -- to hide business assets, police say.

Vancouver police chief Jamie Graham vowed to "shine the light" on
Hells Angels activity when he took over as chair last August of the
national strategy to combat outlaw motorcycle gangs for the Canadian
Association of Chief of Police.

The public is also affected by the hundreds of Hells Angels
"associates" -- a network of friends of club members who have been
known to infiltrate the country's ports, phone companies, the post
office and other government offices where private information can be
obtained about citizens who run afoul of the Angels.

"The ports is an example where they use their associates to facilitate
criminal activity," said Inspector Andy Richards, in charge of the
outlaw motorcycle gang unit within the Combined Forces Special
Enforcement Unit, the successor to the Organized Crime Agency of B.C.

"The telephone company, or Shaw Cable or ICBC, that's an example where
they've just got this wide-range of contacts ... where they can just
make a phone call and get something done, if they need to, for
example, run a licence plate," Richards said.

Hells Angels members also have used the collective muscle of the
organization to push aside competitors in certain business ventures,
he said.

There used to be six or seven agencies that handled strippers in
Vancouver, but now two are controlled by the Angels or associates and
one is an independent, Richards said.

In the early 1990s, Richards said, the now-dead Hells Angels member
Donald Roming was one of the key enforcers helping push others out of
the stripper business -- at one point seriously assaulting one of the
owners of another agency.

"Without speaking ill of the dead, he was responsible for laying a
very serious beating on a 67-year-old man who was involved with one of
the independent companies at the time, to the point this guy was
hospitalized," he explained.

There were no arrests from these "takeovers" because of the victims'
reluctance to report the activities to police, he added.

Over the years, Richards has seen two levels of Hells Angels develop:
"You're seeing the original old-timers, some of whom are 9-to-5ers who
have legitimate jobs driving a truck."

A lot of the old guys are in it for camaraderie and brotherhood, he
said, but most of the younger guys are in it for the money, the power
and the respect that the Hells-Angels patch commands. "The younger
guys see it as a real entrepreneurial activity to get into the club,
to have that protective layer around you, to make money," Richards
said.

But not all the old-timers are members just for the camaraderie. Some
are masters of setting up shell companies to manipulate the stock
market in what are called "pump and dump" schemes -- buying shares to
drive up price, then selling before the price begins dropping, police
say.

The Hells Angels have also been allowed to grow and prosper in B.C.
since members of Vancouver's Satan's Angels motorcycle gang originally
became Hells Angels in a "patch over" in 1983. For years, there were
very few successful prosecutions against full-patch members.

Paulson points to the East End chapter, a wily bunch of individuals
who successfully have eluded convictions, despite a number of charges
that ended up in stays or acquittals.

"They've long been held up to be the seminal chapter, not just in B.C.
but in Canada," he said. "They're wealthy, they're influential and
they're successful at avoiding us."

Only in the last decade has B.C.'s patchwork-quilt of municipal and
RCMP police forces reorganized their attack on the Hells Angels. They
now point to a dozen or so recent successful prosecutions to show
police are finally making inroads.

The RCMP for the second-straight year has identified five priority
organized-crime groups to target. Outlaw motorcycle gangs --
essentially the Hells Angels and its puppet clubs -- are in the No. 1
spot for the second time.

The Mounties in B.C. have also developed a list of the top-20
organized-crime figures in B.C. and nearly half are Hells Angels members.

"Prosecutions are tough," Vancouver police Chief Jamie Graham said in
an interview. But he pointed out: "We're working smarter than we ever
have before."

Some officers feel their superiors blew two rare chances in the past
decade to turn insiders into informants and bust some top-level Hells
Angels and other high-echelon gangsters.

One of the most shocking examples of how police dropped the ball was the
Western Wind debacle, detailed in the recent book The Road to Hell: How the
Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada. Written by Julian Sher and William
Marsden, the book explains how the RCMP in B.C. had a chance to nail
drug-dealers for $330 million worth of cocaine when a Vancouver Island
fisherman offered to help the Mounties intercept a drug shipment between
Colombians and the Hells Angels aboard the vessel Western Wind, which was
headed for Victoria.

The fisherman wanted to be paid $1 million and be placed in witness
protection, but the RCMP declined the offer; U.S. authorities
intercepted the boat loaded with more than two tonnes of cocaine, but
no one was ever charged, says the book, which contains sharp criticism
of the RCMP's handling of the botched case.

One of those who worked on the Western Wind file was former RCMP
officer Pat Convey, now an inspector with the Combined Forces Special
Enforcement Unit. Convey was among those critical in the book of the
handling of the case. "It happened and I'm not going to go into it
again," he said in an interview. "Yes, I got my knuckles rapped [for
speaking out in the book]. I'm not in the RCMP any more."

Could the same problem arise again? "We're human beings and human
beings make mistakes," replied Convey. "I think it's unlikely it would
happen again."

Meanwhile, the prospect of a fifth-anniversary party for the Angels'
Mission chapter appeared to raise little interest in the Fraser Valley
town on Friday. Staff-Sgt. Jack Robinson of the Mission RCMP
detachment said extra members will be on duty over the weekend to keep
an eye on the party.

He said previous anniversary parties at the clubhouse had been without
incident.

[sidebar]

Special News Series

FRIDAY, SEPT. 10

*SECRET 'HITLIST': Targeting B.C.'s crime bosses.

TODAY

* HELLS ANGELS: Outlaw motorcycle gang members and the businesses they
own.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 17

* GANG SLAYINGS: A former Indo-Canadian gangster has details on a
series of unsolved murders.

SATURDAY, SEPT. 18

* Young & violent: Drug-smuggling and the extreme violence of
Indo-Canadian gangs.

Saturday, Sept. 25

* CASH CROP: How the marijuana trade fuels organized
crime.

SATURDAY, OCT. 2

* GOING UNDERCOVER: Money-laundering and the dangerous life of an
undercover cop.

SATURDAY, OCT. 9

* PURSUING JUSTICE: What we must do to put more perpetrators of
organized crime behind bars.