ANGELS WITH DIRTY WINGS

The Biker Trials: Bringing Down the Hells Angels

By Paul Cherry

ECW, 404 pages, $22.95

Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian
Hells Angels

By Jerry Langton

Wiley, 250 pages, $24.99

'I will repeat again that being part of the Hells Angels is not a
crime in itself. But we have surely proven to you that the
organization is a gang in the sense of the Criminal Code, and that it
is a criminal organization."

Federal prosecutor Madeleine Giauque, closing statements to the
court, February, 2004, from The Biker Trials.

According to legend, the Hells Angels motorcycle club cum gang sprang
up in northern California in the late 1940s, pulled together by a
handful of bored former army air corps pilots and bike enthusiasts
looking to drink more than a few beers, and raise a little hell.

As their numbers grew through the 1950s, they were immortalized by
Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. In the 1960s, they associated for a
good time with the Grateful Dead, and once, disastrously, they were
the Rolling Stones' bodyguards at Altamont.

Considered during that time to be a filthy menace and small-time dope
dealers, but hardly masters of organized crime, the Hells Angels have
grown immensely in their expertise and ability to control major
drug-trafficking markets. The organization expanded into Canada in
1977 with a chapter in Laval, Que., fought a series of bloody
bike-gang wars in the province throughout the 1980s, and became the
dominant outlaw motorcycle club in Canada, with the Toronto chapter
now said to be the largest in the world.

Centred mostly in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, membership is
estimated at between 500 and 2,000 full-patch, striker prospects
(probationary members in training), and "hang-around" members
throughout Canada.

Police and prosecutors allege that the gang earns hundreds of
millions of dollars in illicit drug sales and extortion, and kills at
the drop of a hat, or dispute.

However, the Hells Angels were dealt a major blow in 2001, as the
result of massive police investigations and subsequent successful
prosecutions, as explained by veteran Montreal Gazette journalist
Paul Cherry in The Biker Trials.

Cherry's excellent 400-page effort could safely have been subtitled
Everything You Wanted To Know About The Hells Angels, But Were Too
Scared To Find Out, such is the attention to detail and the vivid
tales of motorcycle mob minutiae, including how the group sets up
"puppet" gangs, essentially to do their dirty work.

The book, chock full of interesting pictures of biker mugs in various
poses, is ostensibly about the series of trials from 2002 to 2004
that badly damaged the Hells Angels and jailed its top leadership,
including elite Nomad chapter members Maurice (Mom) Boucher and
Hamilton, Ont., native Walter Stadnick, former national president of
the gang. But it is also a detailed primer on the activities of the
organization from the early 1980s to the present, with the main focus
on Quebec HA nasty business.

According to Cherry, the government finally nailed Boucher (who is
appealing his murder conviction while facing a minimum 15-year
sentence), Stadnick and other top Angels due to the work of
informants and turncoat bikers who cut deals when faced with long
prison terms. Boucher and Stadnick refused to co-operate and are
still presumably held in high esteem by fellow HA members.

Cherry also details how a successful government biker prosecution in
Barrie, Ont., on gangsterism -- in which a member of an identified
criminal organization can have a five-year term added on during the
commission of any crime -- may hamstring the Angels in the 21st century.

Conversely, former Hamilton Spectator reporter Jerry Langton's Fallen
Angel focuses a narrative mostly on Walter (Nurget) Stadnick, whom
many credit for peaceably bringing together a multitude of disparate
bike gangs in Canada under the mantle of the Hells Angels.

Langton may also answer the long-asked question as to origin of
Stadnick's unusual nickname. According to an old acquaintance of
Stadnick's featured in the book, "Nurget" may have referred to
Walter's propensity for selling "nuggets" of hashish in the 1970s,
prior to his big-time biker career. But then again, Langton notes,
the nickname may originate from something else, or even mean nothing.

And perhaps that is one of the problems with Fallen Angel: Stadnick,
and HA since 1982, was and is so stealthy that little is really known
about the reportedly 5-foot, 5-inch biker who is now serving at least
10 years in a federal pen for conspiracy to commit murder and drug dealing.

After some boiler-plate on the history of the Hells Angels, the
abbreviated Stadnick life story makes up the rest of the rather light
250 pages of Fallen Angel, in which Langton admits it was tough
getting people even to talk about the small but tough, and much-feared, Angel.

Langton may also rely too much on a Hamilton police point of view,
with sources such as "Bob the cop" who, along with his colleagues,
had many years to take Stadnick down, but ultimately failed to do so;
the biker was eventually arrested by the feds while on vacation in
the Caribbean.

However, Langton does provide a rather newsy tidbit: He writes that
Stadnick, while organizing HA business in Winnipeg prior to his
arrest, enjoyed a sort of parallel domestic life, living with a woman
in similar circumstances to his common-law partner of two decades in Hamilton.

Also, Langton debunks a myth that Ozzy Osbourne had partied after a
concert at the Angels' Hamilton clubhouse. Notwithstanding published
reports, Langton writes, the Ozzman did not cometh, though some of
his roadies apparently were the guests of honour.

And in an only-in-Hamilton-type tribute, at least one major downtown
bookseller has placed copies of Fallen Angel behind the counter, an
admission, they say, that the book may be popular enough to be picked
up without first being paid for.

Despite my minor quibbles with Fallen Angel, both it and The Biker
Trials are serious, worthy additions to outlaw bikerology, and should
be required reading for those interested in the genre, or any
true-crime story, for that matter.

Both efforts, I think, make it quite clear between the lines that,
although the Hells Angels' top two executives are on forced
sabbatical, the gang, known as "the Big Red Machine," revs on.

In spite of the busts, convictions and new laws, this much is clear:
The Angels, who have recently embarked on public-relations campaigns
to soften their image and argue their Charter rights, are badly
nicked, but not nearly fully negated.