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C H A R L I E A N D T H E A N G E L S

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p R O L O G u E

February 2002

____

I can just picture how it went down.Larry Pooler, a former Para-Dice Rider and now a full-patch

member of the London, Ontario, motorcycle club Hells Angels, leaned against the counter anxiously tapping the straw from his Coke on the wooden top.

As head of 2-4 The Show Productions, he was the promoter of the bike show taking shape around him. There was the hustle and bustle of tables going up and vendors setting out their wares for the day ahead. He thought about heading over to the Hells Angels’ display to grab his body armour, but it was early still. He was like a kid waiting to take a girl on a first date—all ready to go and jittery but with hours left to kill.

Everywhere he looked, Pooler saw other Angels wandering through the London arena, stopping to look at displays or greeting each other, hands clasped and arms thrown around shoulders.

These were brothers. And the strength of that brotherhood was soon to be tested.

Members of the Jackals street gang scurried around the dis-plays, on errands for their Hells Angels masters. These guys made Pooler the most nervous. The puppet club wanted badly to prove its worth. After a botched shootout the month before, they had a score to settle with the Outlaws. They’d gone after a former Outlaws chapter president, Thomas Hughes, a diehard who had re fused to turn colours in the Angels’ recent push to absorb or elimi-nate the local Outlaws. But the street crew had underestimated

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their target and Hughes had rewarded one of them with a bullet in the gut.

The sense of anger and embarrassment the young gangsters were still feeling, coupled with their inexperience, could lead them to jump the gun today. And Pooler knew that timing would be every thing. The Angels wanted all of their rivals, including “the Wop,” in the building before the shit hit the fan. As Pooler fidgeted and watched, he wondered how many Outlaws would show.

Back at their downtown Toronto clubhouse, a two-hour drive northeast of here, the Angels had decided that today would be their decisive confrontation with the Ontario Outlaws. A winner-take-all showdown. The two clubs and their supporters would have at most fifteen minutes of free-for-all before enough police reinforcements arrived to break it up. Until then, security would be negligible, mostly rent-a-cops and some Toronto biker-unit detectives hovering and taking pictures. A few local cops with nothing else to do would probably be there as well, maybe hoping for a minor dust-up or two so they could get some licks in.

The order of the day: maximum damage in minimum time.

The Outlaws prospect drove the van and trailer through the fair-grounds and into the vendors’ entrance of the arena. It was his job to set up the Outlaws table and put a couple of freshly chopped bikes on display. As he pulled up to their spot on the arena floor he saw all the biking paraphernalia a rider could want: helmets, chrome crank covers, high-polish exhaust pipes. In the aisles around him, people were busily hanging Harley-Davidson T-shirts and belts and every other kind of clothing they figured they could sell to the expected crowd. Looking up and down the arena floor, he realized something. It was thick with Angels and their supporters.

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He told the other prospects with him to leave their patches in the van. Something was very wrong.

While they got out and started setting up, the driver stayed in the van and picked up his cell phone. Call in when you arrive, he’d been told, once you’ve had a good look at who’s at the show. He dialled and asked to talk to the Wop.

After the nervous prospect said his piece, the man on the other end took the news in stride. He had already dispatched three Outlaws vehicles southwest to Windsor, where they were to pick up some “friends” coming across the border from Detroit. His troops should be back in town by now, or very close to it. The Wop’s Outlaws would enter the arena en masse. And the Bandidos would be right beside them.

At Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) headquarters in London, a small group of squad leaders gathered to discuss the storm brewing at the fairground arena. They had some decisions to make. The cops knew the Outlaws would want to show the Bandidos that they were ready to spill as much Hells Angels blood as necessary to defend their turf—and then some—just to prove to the Americans that the beaten-down Ontario Outlaws were worthy of their alliance.

That the Outlaws were lining up at a bike show against mem-bers and supporters of the Hells Angels, and were doing so with their numbers bolstered by the Bandidos, was no coincidence. Yes, gang members fight over disputed territory all the time. But two hundred of them at once? That was unheard of in Canada. But a few of those cops were old enough to remember something similar happening only about 150 kilometres south of here. It had been almost a carbon copy of the scene taking shape at the bike show. And those who weren’t old enough to remember it sure knew how it had ended.

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In March 1971, police had gotten word that the Breed MC were planning to confront the Hells Angels at a bike show in Cleveland, Ohio. The Breed were a two hundred–strong biker gang from the New Jersey area. Cops weren’t sure what their beef was on this occasion, but sensing disaster they contacted the Angels and advised them not to show. Some out-of-town Angels were already on their way and never got word, and twenty-seven of them arrived at the show. Fortunately for them, many of the Angels’ friends and small support clubs had come too. Still, that left them badly under-manned. Some 160 Breed members stepped up to about 70 Angels and friends, one yelled “Now!” and the east-coasters attacked. A large number of police arrived minutes after it started, but the carnage was well underway. The day’s final count was one dead Angel, four dead Breed and two dead Angel supporters. All died of stab wounds and blunt-force trauma. Dozens were taken to the hospital and fifty-seven were arrested. Afterwards some of the Breed leaders admitted that they had had no reason for the initiating the confrontation except the thrill of the brawl.

So today, over three decades later, the London cops had a pretty good idea what they would be dealing with if the expected battle erupted.

A squad of Biker Enforcement Unit (BEU) detectives had dis-creetly “escorted” the three Outlaws drivers—one was in fact a police agent—on the trip to Windsor, and were following them and the Bandidos back to London. Another squad was already in place around the fairground in case things blew up earlier than expected. Local police were covering all avenues of escape. Should a confron-tation at the bike show spin out of control, the cops had dropped a noose around the arena that could be tightened immediately.

Someone suggested they should stop the Bandidos before they reached town. If they let their agent enter that arena he could be killed. But just cutting off the reinforcements wouldn’t stop a con-frontation, the others argued. If anything, considering how lopsided

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the numbers would be without the Bandidos, the Angels would be even more tempted to get started. No, to be most effective the police had to make their show of strength at the point of crisis. This was the cops’ party too, their chance to shine.

The fair was getting crowded. Angels continued to arrive, from Toronto, Niagara Falls and other towns nearby. It didn’t take long before they and their supporters numbered well over a hundred. Outlaws were arriving too, pouring in from every chapter in southern Ontario. The two groups paced and circled, waiting for the order, or a threatening gesture, or one wrong word that could not go unpunished.

The Outlaws were still outnumbered and watching the Angels assemble when, with fanfare and loud voices, the three cars arrived from their border run with their cargo of Bandidos pouring into the arena. The Americans greeted the local Outlaws with noisy displays of camaraderie so there could be no doubt whose side the new arrivals were on.

As if there ever could be doubt when the Outlaws and the Hells Angels were involved.

The Angels leaders quickly called a meeting. The Bandidos had caught them off guard and the Angels’ advantage in numbers had just disappeared. If they waited any longer, more Outlaws might show up. Or more Bandidos, or some other unexpected allies. The Outlaws had a lot of friends, so they couldn’t be sure more street gangs or independents wouldn’t jump at the chance to show their stuff in front of the gang who had ruled this part of the country for over a decade. The numbers were even now, and another large con-tingent would tip the balance. It was time.

Like a high school dance with the boys on one side and the girls on the other, bikers congregated on opposite sides of the arena. With a flip of the wrist, iron bars and wrenches dropped out of

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sleeves and into waiting hands. No one kidded themselves; they all knew men on both sides were right now breathing their last. But the conflict coming to a head at the London Bike Show had all the momentum of a runaway freight train that had been picking up speed for half a century, and history like that left a man no room for backing out, no room for sober second thought.

The Breed might have claimed they were starting lethal brawls for fun, but whipping up this kind of trouble usually takes bad blood that goes way back. In the case of the Outlaws and the Angels, more than half a century. Even though the Outlaws predate the Angels by a decade—a fact the Angels don’t agree with, but that’s for later—that rivalry long ago became an essential part of the Outlaws’ identity. You can’t even begin to talk about them without talking about their hatred of the big club from California.

That hasn’t changed in recent years, even though there’s recently been a crucial change in the world of biker gangs. Dedicated riders and partiers that they are, the Outlaws never seemed as organ-ized as their rivals, and so they watched as the Hells Angels out-paced their growth in places like Canada and Europe and Australia and became the biggest motorcycle club (MC), if not the oldest. The Outlaws seemed resigned to being number two, and then number three once the Bandidos grew their ranks in places like Germany and Australia (if you read my last book, you’ll know they didn’t fare so well in Canada). But the Outlaws have a very quiet way of enter-ing new territory. They often enter on the periphery while the Angels and Bandidos madly patch over clubs in the major cities and fight for supremacy over rights to prime drug and prostitution ter-ritories. Some might call them timid. Angels president Sonny Barger did. In his book, no less. But he and everyone else can call them something else now: number one.

As of 2012, the Outlaws are the world’s biggest motorcycle gang.

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If that doesn’t inspire hostility, I’m not sure what would. Though for all the old bike clubs’ might and influence in their native U.S., it’s not as easy as it used to be to portray the global underworld map in the red-and-white of the Angels and the black-and-white of the Outlaws. The bigger bike gangs have consolidated many others under their banners over the years, but new gangs are once again vying for influence and authority. None yet have the reach and influ-ence of the Big Four, but in places like Sydney, Winnipeg and Vancouver, they’re starting to look a lot less like support clubs and more like equal kings of their own street. For now, though, the old rivalries remain, and it’s one very old quarrel that still shapes alle-giances and wars fought everywhere from Perth to Peoria.

You might wonder why bikers who have so much in common would hate each other, the way members of the Outlaws and the Hells Angels do. Members occasionally change loyalties from one gang to the other, sometime under duress—as was happening in London, Ontario, in 2002. The Outlaws and Bandidos in particular like to call themselves “Nations,” but the Big Four—the Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws and Pagans—and their lesser relations seem more like feuding cousins. Like the Hatfields and McCoys.

Or the McCooks.It’s been a while since a gang used that name. But if you want

to know where the sixty years of animosity between the Outlaws and the Hells Angels begins, you’d need to return to McCook County, Illinois.

Before we go back to the beginning, I should explain my perspec-tive on bikers. I was a contracted agent for twenty-five years. That means police forces—local, regional and national—all over the world hired me to cozy up to organized crime and collect the

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information needed to throw gangsters in jail. I worked Asian triads, the KKK, the Russian mafia, the Hells Angels in San Diego and Bandidos in Washington State, and some smaller biker gangs in Ontario and Australia, like the old Para-Dice Riders and the Nomads in Sydney. I ran into more than a few Outlaws in those years—a few the hard way. I took part in the Bandidos’ mediation of the Outlaws and Hells Angels conference at Sturgis in 1984.

I’ve witnessed the rivalry between the two big motorcycle gangs first-hand. It never ceases to amaze me that a beef between two groups with beginnings as disorganized as a few scattered clubs across California and a bunch of grease monkeys in small-town Illinois could today underpin so much of the world’s organized crime. But it does. And this is how it happened.

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PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright © 2012 Alex Caine

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote

brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Page 245 is a continuation of this copyright page.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Caine, AlexCharlie and the Angels : the Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the sixty years war /

Alex Caine.

Also issued in electronic format.

ISBN 978-0-307-35894-3

1. Outlaws (Gang)––History. 2. Hell’s Angels––History. I. Title.

HV6486.C348 2012 364.106'6 C2012-901430-8

Cover image: © BORIS ROESSLER/epa/Corbis

Printed and bound in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Cain_9780307358943_9p_all_r2.indd 4 11/9/12 2:15 PM

Purchase a copy of

CHARLIE AND THE ANGELS from one of these retailers:

Also available:

Published by Random House of Canada