HELLS ANGELS ROAR AT CENTER OF VIOLENT QUEBEC DRUG WAR

MONTREAL - As the body count continues to rise in Quebec's vicious
biker war, one of its generals - a Hells Angels 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 Hells,'' 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
correction 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' bossman 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 of
Canada. ''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 serious 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 Montreal 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 II 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 Internet Website.
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 copyrighted corporate logos.

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
Sergeant 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 following the
killings of 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 that the killing of gangsters by other
gangsters 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
MacDonald, 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.

But if the Hells Angels emerge as the undisputed winners in the Quebec
war, potential enemies in Ontario might be frightened into cutting
them a big piece of the action without a battle.

''The Hells have never lost a war, and can't afford to lose this
one,'' said anthropologist Daniel Wolf, who once rode with an Alberta
affiliate of the Angels. ''A big part of their power stems from their
image as the bikers that never back down.''

Checked-by: Patrick Henry