Gangs (25 page)

‘We’re so prominent it’s untrue,’ Dr Harris told me. ‘We ride about on big bikes and wear patches on our backs to say who we are and where we’re from. I mean, if you’re hell bent on collective criminality, it’s hardly the way to go about it. We’d have all been arrested years ago. We’re not trying to claim that we’re all perfect. Nobody ever is, but to suggest that we represent a significant threat to the peace and prosperity of Britain is taking things too far.’

So when, as happens periodically, an Angel is arrested, charged and convicted of crimes ranging from murder and mortgage fraud to drug-dealing and assault, the usual excuse is that their ranks might contain a few bad apples but that doesn’t make them a new Mafia. ‘The club,’ said Harris, ‘cannot be held responsible for the actions of individual members.’

There are many things the Hells Angels don’t like to talk about. The exact meaning of the many patches and badges that they wear comes near the top of the list. One Hells Angels website features a handy code of conduct for members of the public wishing to fraternise with members: ‘Don’t ask what a patch or insignia means on any Motorcycle Club member’s vest. It’s club business! It’s okay if you’re talking to a club member to ask/say, ‘That’s a great-looking pin, is it ivory?’, but not ‘What does that stand for? It’s not that it’s anything mystic or cryptic, it’s just that it’s for members, and members only, to know.’

As soon as he had recovered from the injuries sustained in the car-bombing, Cunningham was back on the Angels social circuit, attending rallies, parties and runs, and generally living the hedonistic biker life. Almost immediately the denim cut-off and leather jacket that bore his colours featured a new patch: two Nazi-style SS lightning bolts below the words ‘Filthy Few’. According to the biography of legendary Hells Angel Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, president of the Oakland chapter, the Filthy Few patch is a piece of harmless fun. ‘It means that someone is the first to arrive at a party and the last to leave,’ he says. In reality the patch is only awarded to Angels who have murdered on behalf of the club – usually in the presence of another member for corroboration – or who are prepared to commit a murder at a moment’s notice. Despite failing to complete the task he had been assigned, Cunningham’s willingness to plant the bomb had been judged sufficient to enable him to join the Filthy Few.

Such a reward was necessary for Cunningham because activities of this kind are not undertaken lightly. When the Angels go to war with rival gangs (and occasionally among themselves) outsiders can be forgiven for thinking it revolves around nothing more than club pride and maintaining the hedonistic fighting and drinking traditions of the biker lifestyle.

The truth is that the primary reasons the Angels do battle is to protect their business interests. And these days, almost exclusively, that means the drugs trade. Across the world biker gangs are involved in drug-dealing and trafficking on a massive scale. Estimates from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms suggest the Angels and the other biker gangs collectively earn up to £1 billion a year from the drugs business.

‘The Hells Angels particularly are very involved in the drug-dealing scene in the UK,’ says a spokesman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service. ‘Traditionally their commodities were cannabis and amphetamine, but they are moving more and more into Class A drugs.’

Stephen Cunningham was a major amphetamine and cannabis dealer and the man whose car he attempted to blow up was not just the member of a rival biker gang but also the head of a rival drugs outfit that had been attempting to flood Cunningham’s turf with cheap supplies of cannabis, amphetamine and cocaine.

Virtually every fight, every shooting, every stabbing and every bombing that has taken place between biker gangs in the UK and further afield in the past twenty-five years is ultimately connected to a desire to protect the highly lucrative drugs business from which the gangs derive the vast majority of their income. Although they are also involved in several other areas – prostitution, theft and extortion among them – drugs are considered the core business.

The Angels in particular are super-cautious, rarely carrying the product themselves, preferring to bury it then tell customers where to find it. One amphetamine dealer supplied by the Angels complained to police how they regularly drove him half mad with his weekly delivery. When he had deposited the money earlier in the day at a ‘safe’ drop site, they would call him in the early hours of the following morning and simply tell him, ‘It’s in your garden.’ The dealer’s neighbours reported how he could regularly be seen in his underpants at four a.m., armed with a torch and a spade, searching frantically for the goods.

One police surveillance team followed a pair of Angels (who were not wearing their colours so as not to attract attention) to a local park and watched as they sat about for around two hours feeding the ducks and exchanging pleasantries with passers-by before leaving. It was only later that it emerged the two had been supervising the pick-up of a kilo of amphetamine. The drugs had been concealed in a rubbish bin earlier in the day and the Angels were there to ensure that no one but their customer picked it up.

Failure to stick to protocol leaves the bikers open to prosecution as was the case when a Thames Valley Angel was stopped on his bike during a routine check. He was found to have a half an ounce of amphetamine sulphate inside his glove, and later privately admitted that the only reason he had been caught was because a sale had been cancelled; rather than taking the product to the stash site, which would have involved a longer journey, he decided to risk keeping it with him.

But even when caught red-handed, many Angels are bolshie enough to beat the rap. When one senior member was stopped in his car soon after leaving a rally and found to have a bag containing nine kilos of high-quality cannabis resin beside him, he didn’t hesitate to tell the police officers the truth. ‘What a coincidence,’ he told them. ‘I was just on my way to the police station to hand this in. I found it at the rally. I think it might be drugs.’ The Angel’s fingerprints were found on the outside of the bag but not on the packets of drugs inside. It meant it was impossible to disprove his story – no matter how unlikely – and the charges were dropped.

It was a similar story when another Angel was stopped and found to have half a kilo of cocaine and a loaded handgun hidden behind a door panel of the vehicle. ‘You’ve got me bang to rights,’ he told the officers. ‘I stole the car.’

Indeed, the vehicle was not registered to him or anyone else within the gang (though it wasn’t until some hours later that the registered owner reported it stolen). With no fingerprint evidence, even the owner could not be charged with possession. All those connected to the vehicle were acquitted of all charges.

The Angels and the other biker gangs involved in the drugs trade protect themselves from police ‘buy and bust’ operations by restricting themselves to selling to those on a list of ‘approved’ customers. Particular deals are co-ordinated and run by individual bikers using a few associates, mostly prospects or hang-arounds (the two ranks below full membership of the club) to do the legwork. That way, even if they’re caught, the club is unlikely to be implicated.

For this reason prosecutions involving large numbers of bikers or attempts to prove the club as a whole is involved in a conspiracy are rare, but the case against the St Austell-based Scorpio gang, jailed in the mid-1980s, shows the level of sophistication the trafficking can reach. The Scorpio had earned themselves more than £1 million by cornering the market for cannabis, amphetamines and LSD in the West Country, and Plymouth in particular, by using strong-arm tactics to drive other suppliers out of business.

Under the guidance of president Mark ‘Snoopy’ Dyce, gang associates purchased large quantities of amphetamine powder and cannabis resin in Amsterdam, paying for them using Thomas Cook money orders. Packets of drugs were then concealed in false compartments of specially adapted Ford cars and driven through Customs. Then, from a safe house in Rainham, Essex (deliberately far away from the gang’s home turf), the drugs were wrapped in brown paper, labelled ‘motorcycle parts’ and sent to customers around the country using British Rail’s Red Star parcel-delivery service. Ever conscious of police surveillance, drug deals were never spoken about but negotiated on paper. Like the Angels, they kept many of their drug supplies hidden away. Amphetamine worth £20,000 belonging to the gang was found buried in Southway Woods.

The Scorpio gang were relatively small and isolated so had to run every aspect of the smuggling operation themselves, but the Angels and the larger clubs are able to take full advantage of the fact that they have representatives in countries around the world to help ease the passage of narcotics from one border to another.

In 1994 detectives swooped on London’s Hilton Hotel and arrested two Canadian Angels, Pierre Rodrigue and David Rouleau, who had travelled to London to supervise a planned shipment of more than a tonne of cocaine. Rouleau in particular, clean-cut and fresh-faced, looked far more like a city stockbroker or accountant than a member of a biker gang and typifies the way the Angels have adjusted their image to blend into the background rather than stand out from the crowd.

It was for this reason that Cunningham was freshly scrubbed and wearing a smart business suit the day he boarded the ferry to Ostend and vanished from the face of the earth. His final destination was Amsterdam where he was due to meet with Dutch Angels to pay for a consignment of cannabis that would be shipped to Britain later. There were also discussions to be had about future drugs deals and deliveries of ecstasy to enable the Angels to move into the club drugs market.

The Angels already control much of the cocaine, amphetamine and ecstasy trade in the Netherlands. They work closely with the Kampers – the Dutch gypsy community – who in turn are closely connected to members of the Colombian Cali cocaine cartel, and Cunningham is believed to have been promised an introduction.

‘That part of the trip went smoothly,’ one source close to the Nomads told me, ‘but the problems began when he started heading back. Grumps had always been a popular member of the club, but a few months before he vanished, he had a big falling-out with some of the other Nomads. They unanimously voted to get rid of him and when the Angels do that, they mean something more than just kicking you out of the club.

‘He had been involved at the highest levels and knew all their secrets and that meant he was a liability. When they decided to take him out, they knew it had to be done on a permanent basis. Members of the Dutch Angels agreed to do the job. They say Grumps is at the bottom of some canal now. I don’t think his body is ever going to be found.’

The legend that was to become the Hells Angels was born on 17 March 1948 when Second World War veteran Otto Friedli formed a new bike gang out of the remnants of two notorious fighting and drinking clubs.

Dozens of loose-knit biker groups, with names like the Booze Fighters and the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington, had sprung up across America in the mid-1940s. Motorcycles were cheap – many were sold off as military surplus – and appealed in particular to the hundreds of former soldiers and airmen who found it hard to cope with uneventful lives following the end of the war. They came together at weekends, riding hard and drinking even harder. For those who had nowhere to go when Monday came, the club turned into a surrogate family.

In 1947 at an American Motorcycle Association drag-racing meeting in the quiet town of Hollister, California, the Pissed Off Bastards rode in drunk and created absolute mayhem, fighting anyone and everyone and ripping the place to shreds. The local sheriff later described the scene as ‘just one hell of a mess’. Quick to control the public-relations damage, the AMA denounced the Bastards, saying it was unfortunate that one per cent of motorcyclists should ruin it for the law-abiding
99
per cent. To this day, outlaw biker gangs wear the ‘1%’ badge with pride.

In the months following Hollister, internal tensions rose among the Bastards and the Booze Fighters so Bastard member Friedli broke away and took a few like-minded souls with him. Basing himself in San Bernadino, Friedli adopted a name favoured by fighter pilots – Hell’s Angels – structured the gang along military lines and continued the theme on the gang’s crest: a grinning, winged death’s head wearing a pilot’s helmet. (Friedli’s seamstress forgot to include the apostrophe and it has been officially omitted ever since.)

The Angels continued the drinking, fighting and terrorising tradition that had started at Hollister and their exploits reached a new level of public awareness following the release of the 1953 Marlon Brando film
The Wild One
(based loosely on the Hollister incident), which proved a Hollywood hit. That same year, the original Hells Angels chapter merged with San Francisco’s Market Street Commandos to spawn the club’s second chapter, and soon more popped up along the California coastline. Although the numbers were growing there was no real organisation among the groups, no single vision. All that changed, however, in 1957 when Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger helped establish the Oakland chapter.

Charismatic, intelligent and willing to lead by example, it was under Barger’s guidance that the Hells Angels chapters came together, hammering out bylaws, codes of conduct, and harmonising patches, colours, tattoos and clubhouses. When Friedli was sent to prison a year later, Barger took over as president. Although Barger insists he is not the leader of the Hells Angels, he is widely considered so by both law-enforcement officers and club members, and undoubtedly wears an unofficial crown.

The tales of violence and destruction culminated in 1964 when four Angels were accused of rape in the oceanside town of Monterey. The high-profile case not only saw the first of many, many headlines demonising the biker gang but also allegedly marked the beginning of the Angels’ move into international drug-trafficking. In order to pay legal bills, so the legend goes, the Hells Angels made a few drugs deals, selling methamphetamines coast to coast.