THE DEVIL TAKE THESE ANGELS

Angels Of Death: Inside The Bikers' Global Crime Empire

By William Marsden and Julian Sher Knopf Canada, 464 pages, $34.95

'They had not planned on beheading her." With this chilling
introduction to the 2001 murder of Cynthia Garcia, whose bloated
remains were found in the Arizona desert, Angels of Death becomes a
razor-edged ride to the core of evil and back.

By her biker murderer's own brusque assessment, Garcia was "a nobody,
a loser." Yet her tawdry death became an integral element of a
perversely glamorous mystique which, according to William Marsden and
Julian Sher, continues to make the Hells Angels the world's most
powerful and feared motorcycle club.

Angels of Death is as contemporary as it gets. Its most recent case
studies are scarcely weeks old; its intense analysis of this evil
empire as current and finely tuned as a newly minted Harley chopper.

The narrative is multilayered and global in scope, ranging from the
Australian desert to the Canadian Rockies, from the canals of
Amsterdam to the seamy side of San Bernardino, Calif., where the club
was formed in 1948, its unifying symbol the Death Head patch framed
inside a set of angelic wings.

Contemporary globalization has been driven, for the most part, by the
U.S. corporation and the Yankee greenback. It is only natural that
the cultural tremor caused by the Angels, that most viscerally
American criminal society, would likewise reverberate around the
world. The Angels have given European followers stature, power and
wealth in a corporate invasion that has rewarded them with global
reach and appetite.

But this is no ordinary business expansion. Hells Angels Motorcycle
Club Inc. is involved in hostile takeovers that would make Bay
Street's toughest quake at the knees and press the panic button.

Whether exacting revenge in the Australian Outback by blowing up
entire towns, hacking opponents to death with axes at British
rock-and-roll reunions, or engaging in wild-west shootouts with
rivals at Harrah's Nevada Casino, the Hells Angels have shown that
they dare to go where mere devils fear to tread.

According to the authors, North American police agencies have long
appreciated the war footing that such black-hearted arrogance brings.
Yet the New Europe appears blithely ignorant of the Angels, seeing
the evil they espouse as a perverse thrill to be enjoyed as a
coquettish voyeur, without personal cost.

"The Dutch thought they knew better," Marsden and Sher write. "To
them, outlaw bikers were simply a quirky American subculture. If
other countries followed Holland's policy of tolerance and acceptance
[they thought], the world would be a better place." In a country
where courts order an armed robber to reimburse the 6,600 euros he
stole from a bank, minus the 2,000 euros he paid for his gun, such
specious logic might make sense, but the harsh reality is far more damning.

The Hells Angel clubhouse in Amsterdam was fully funded by tax
dollars to promote charity events, motorcycle riding and youth
activities. By the time it was a completed fortress -- where rape was
commonplace and hard drugs the norm -- it was too late for the
denizens of that liberal city to change their minds and retake the bastion.

By 2003, Schiphol Airport had become the European gateway for
Colombian cocaine trans-shipped by Hells Angels through Dutch
Curacao. When authorities began checking all flights from Curacao,
they arrested so many people that prisons couldn't hold them. Most
were set free, their drugs confiscated.

Amsterdam's red-light district is infamous for its violence, and in
one notable case, for the death and dismemberment of a woman. Her
file would be dubbed Operation Annoyance by callous detectives, who
were too indifferent to identify the mutilated remains -- until the
case was taken up by a crusading Dutch reporter, who made public the
fact that she had been murdered by Angels and her body parts fed to
pigs. The Dutch statute of limitations on murder, 18 years, ran out
before the Angel suspect could be convicted.

The rest of Europe is also cruising in blissful auto-glide as it
relates to bike gangs. In Sweden, bikers stole 16 antitank weapons
and hundreds of grenades from unguarded militia depots. Machine gun
battles broke out in Oslo and Copenhagen. Rocket attacks destroyed
biker hangouts in Helsinki. In England, the Angels led the Queen's
50th Jubilee Parade, and the minister of state for policing
personally led a Hells Angel "Toy Run for Charity."

Angels of Death has a real-life hero, Jay Dobyns, a towering, former
star receiver for the University of Arizona Wildcats, who joined the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in search of excitement. This
he surely got. Shot in the back in his rookie week, before he drew
his first paycheque, then catapulted through the air by a bandit's
fleeing car a few weeks later, Dobyns survived and thought he was
ready to take on the Angels.

His efforts and successes are chronicled in gut-wrenching detail. His
journey into the Valley of Death is a modern-day odyssey on which few
of us would venture forth. A chess match with Satan. As Dobyns
says,with the blunt eloquence of a warrior, "When you walk into their
territory and the door locks behind you, you're all alone. Cop or no
cop badge, there is no cavalry coming to save you . . . it's just you
and a bunch of bikers and no one else."

The undercover agents in Angels of Death are not neophytes. Their
backstop is letter perfect: aliases, alibis, able support in the form
of 007-style technology. And they truly need it, for the Angels
portrayed in this work have the means and the will to corrupt judges,
politicians and police.

Canada does not escape well-justified criticism on this score. The
Quebec biker wars of a decade ago, which claimed 150 lives, are
searingly recounted, and should have marked a national watershed.

Yet many Canadians are in denial about the true nature of organized
crime. British Columbia has an illicit marijuana cash crop worth
$2.5-billion annually, with B.C. pot 10 to 15 times as potent as that
hippies smoked in the 1960s. Contrary to current popular opinion,
legalizing pot does not alter the harsh lessons of the Dutch
experience: The Angels have muscled their way into control of
Amsterdam's "legitimate" market. Cancer cannot be treated by benign
neglect or by turning a blind eye.

Read this tome carefully, dear reader, and never, ever, let your
guard down. The veneer of civilization runs very thin, and the Trojan
horse at our gates looks disturbingly like a Harley chopper.

K. G. E. (Chuck) Konkel is a serving Canadian police officer and an
expert on organized crime. He has written two thrillers set in Hong
Kong and Mexico, and is completing a third, set in Berlin in 1945.