CRIME: PROVINCE'S CHAPTERS OF THE HELLS ANGELS ARE AMONG THE MOST MURDEROUS
IN THE WORLD.

Montreal-As the body count continues to rise in Quebec's vicious biker
war,one of it's generals-a Hells Angel honcho known as "mom"-went to trial
this week amid some of the heaviest security ever seen in a Canadian
courtroom.

"Mom" is the nickname of Maurice Boucher, the bespectacled and oddly
preppie-looking overlord of "les Hills," as riders of the outlaw gang are
known to Quebecers. He is accused in the killings of two Quebec prison
guards - hits apparently ordered to teach a lesson after corrections
officials showed disrespect for Angels in custody.

It is a big case for the hard pressed forces of the law in a province where
mayhem and massacre have become commonplace, thanks to Boucher and his
savage breed.

But even with the Angels' boss behind bars, car bombs are still exploding
across the province with appalling frequency, and hardly a week passes
without a midnight ambush outside some biker-controlled strip joint or
tawdry roadhouse.

The war pitting Quebec's Hells Angels against a hodgepodge of rival biker
gangs, backed by the province's more traditional organized-crime groups, is
roaring toward its fifth year, with the death tally growing and no end in
sight. At stake is the Quebec drug trade as well as prostitution, smuggling,
auto theft, extortion and other rackets worth tens of millions of dollars
annually.

"The war is about turf, profits and market share - not some abstract biker
honor," said Corporal Jacques Lemieux, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police
investigator assigned to the Criminal Intelligence Service. "So that makes
it deadly serious."

The Quebec war is considered the bloodiest in the 50-year history of the
world's most infamous biker bunch. At least 93 are dead so far, with scores
more maimed or seriously wounded - mostly bikers and their thuggish
comrades, but also civilians cut down in the crossfire. So extraordinary has
the level of violence become that even the Economist, a serous British news
magazine little given to sensationalism, recently ran a lengthy examination
of the Hells Angels' audacious grab for criminal power in Canada.

During the past two weeks alone, three bikers have been cut down in a fierce
spiral of retaliation between the Angels and their criminal competitors: one
shot dead in the gritty city of Laval, the riddled body of another found in
his Montral apartment, the charred corpse of a third pulled from a black
Jeep Cherokee - trademark transport of the gang in a province whose long
winters discourage roaring about on Harley-Davidsons - after the vehicle
exploded on a road north of Quebec City.

Elaborate gang funerals have become routine in Montreal, with bikers
arriving in menacing regalia to mourn their fallen chums while police
surveillance teams and news photographers snap away behind long lenses.

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was incorporated in California in 1948 by
restless World War 11 veterans bound by a passion for riding Harleys and
raising Cain. For decades, they were little more than underwashed,
beer-swilling rowdies, dangerous only to those foolish enough to sass them
in saloons.

Today, however, the Angels rank among the world's most ruthless
organized-crime syndicates, with 125 chapters in 22 countries in North and
South America, Europe and the Pacific. That figure includes the Nomads, an
elite corps of Angels, but not the Hundreds of lesser biker gangs that
operate under the direct control of the Hells.

One sign of the times: The Angels boast their own Web site. They hawk
T-shirts by electronic order and warn that both their name - with its
eccentric, apostrophe-less spelling - and their death's-head symbol are

Although long entrenched in British Columbia, the Hells didn't move into
Quebec until 1977, when they took over a homegrown gang, the Popeyes. Today,
the French-speaking riders of the province's chapters are considered the
most murderous members of the notoriously violence-prone fraternity.

"They tend to make spectacular hits intended to horrify, not just intimidate
or coerce. They sometimes act more like terrorists than ordinary criminals,"
said Jean-Paul Brodeur, a criminologist with the University of Montreal's
International Center for Comparative Criminology. "They are organized to
deliver full-scale war."

It was in 1994 that the Hells Angels moved to take over Quebec's illegal
drug trade. But they were met with surprisingly fierce resistance from a
Montreal-based biker band called the Rock Machine, which police describe as
essentially a front group for the province's more traditional crime
families.

"No one expected the Rock Machine to last this long against a group so big,
powerful and internationally connected," said Lemieux. "Now the Hells are
stepping up the war. They want to bring it to an end."

In recent weeks, two top leaders of the Rock Machine have been gunned down
in ambushes, a marked change from earlier tactics in which the foot soldiers
of both sides were targeted, but rarely the generals.

"For a long time they were going after the knees," said RCMP Staff Sgt. J.P.
Levesque, an organized-crime specialist. "Now they are going for the head."

Meanwhile, several bomb blasts in September narrowly missed Hells Angels,
ripping apart vehicles and raising the fear level on the streets of
Montreal.

Police efforts to bring the battling factions under control have been
largely thwarted, although the arrest of Boucher after the hits on the two
prison guards was an important coup. But last July, in a major setback to
law enforcement, five Angels associates were acquitted of murdering a Rock
Machine rival, apparently because jurors were unconvinced the killing of
gangsters by other gangster represented a social wrong.

According to Quebec news reports, the Rock Machine may be negotiating an
alliance with the Texas-based Bandidos, archrivals of the Hells Angels and
the only other biker gang with an international reach.

The last blowout between the Bandidos and Angels was fought in Scandinavia
with assault rifles and grenade launchers. It ended in a truce several weeks
ago after a dozen or so deaths, making it a mere skirmish compared to the
Quebec carnage.

Elsewhere in Canada, the Hells Angels are growing fast, adding new chapters
in Alberta and Saskatchewan in recent months. According to police, the gang
is a major crime presence in every province except Ontario and tiny Prince
Edward Island - and is well on its way toward controlling serious drug
trafficking across the nation.

In British Columbia and Nova Scotia, for instance, the Hells Angels control
not only distribution of heroin, cocaine and hydroponically grown marijuana,
but also, through waterfront unions, the ports at which smuggled drugs
enter.

"They are using this particular province and this particular sea coast as a
platform to the world," Halifax's police chief, Vincent MacDonal, recently
told reporters. "They are involved in international organized crime."

If Quebec falls, the Hells Angels are almost certain to turn their attention
to Ontario, Canada's most populous province and the only important territory
in Canada they have failed to penetrate.

Police say that entry into Ontario might result in another bloody war, since
at least 13 rival biker gangs are already active in that province, and other
organized-crime groups such as the Mafia and Asian triads are unlikely to
accommodate them.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst