NO MORE MR. WISE GUY

That a national survey has found Quebecers fear criminal biker gangs more
than traditional criminal organizations isn't surprising. Residents of
Montreal and Quebec City have had more than their fill of the shootings,
bombings and beatings that have marked the bloody progress of the
eight-year turf war between the Hells Angels and their competitors for the
illegal drug trade.

Unlike their more senior counterparts in the Mafia, the outlaw bikers do
their killings in public, noisily. And, given their inadvertent murder of
an 11-year-old boy in a 1995 car bombing, sloppily. This spectacular,
broad-daylight amateurism, crowned by an apparent assassination attempt on
Montreal crime reporter Michel Auger last September, has led to media
scrutiny of criminal bikers unheard of in the rest of Canada and with it
the transformation of "Mom" Boucher and Fred Faucher into household names
in Quebec.

What is surprising about the survey, conducted last month by the polling
firm Leger Marketing, is the perception here and in the rest of the country
that despite the flurry of anti-gang legislation and the creation of
specialized police forces sparked by Quebec's biker wars, authorities
possess neither the legal nor financial means to deal with the problem of
organized crime.

There are at least eight outlaw bikers presently behind bars after pleading
guilty to a plethora of charges (including the relatively newly minted
offence of "gangsterism") who put the lie to this belief.

Part of the fallout of an anti-biker gang offensive in Quebec last March
was Operation Printemps, an all-out anti-gang sweep that resulted in 125
arrests, ranging from Hells Angels members to street-level drug dealers.
Last year, with Project Omerta, police struck a blow against one of the
most powerful branches of the traditional Mafia in Canada, getting guilty
pleas from three senior members of a crime family with ties to
international money laundering.

These are hardly nickel-and-dime operations, and their success indicates
that police can duke it out with organized crime - and do so successfully -
with existing legal means and resources.

So why the public nervousness? Perhaps some might blame the media for
putting the crime on Page 1 and the punishment on the inside pages. Or
maybe after spending the past decade listening to politicians spout sound
bites about how it's time to get tough on crime, we've simply climbed on
board. Maybe we figure that, after nearly a century of allowing its growth
to proceed virtually unchecked (an expansion aided by the regular
consumption of illegal drugs by presumably otherwise law-abiding
Canadians), it's time to turn our attention to what eight out of 10
Canadians polled in the survey perceive as the serious or very serious
problem of all forms of organized crime.

Or perhaps the survey indicates a finding not spelled out in the polling
data. Perhaps after a generation spent perceiving mythical mobsters like
Vito Corleone or Tony Soprano as cultural icons, nice guys who just happen
to be wise guys, Canadians have finally grown up and realized the reality
behind those characters is as grasping, amoral and bloody as anything to
have made the headlines in Quebec.

And maybe, for the criminals sitting in a gang clubhouse in Quebec or in
the back room of a private club in Toronto, that perception, more than any
law or wire tap, is a reason to start getting scared.