Outlaws: Inside the Violent World of Biker Gangs (27 page)

When the Midland Outlaws unwittingly found themselves at the patch-over party that saw two chapters of Denmark’s Undertakers MC don the colours of the Fat Mexican, they had no doubt that the Hell’s Angels would have something to say about it.

A couple of years earlier, the Angels had responded to the opening of the first European chapter of the Bandidos by arranging a drive-by shooting that killed the club’s vice-president, Michael ‘Bubu’ Burel. In the aftermath, both sides began recruiting heavily and the opening of the first Scandinavian Bandidos chapter looked as though it could be the catalyst to escalate the conflict into a full-scale war.

Crucially though, the biker scene in Scandinavia was very different to the scene Boone had grown up in in the UK. For some time, club pride and brotherhood had taken second place to the pursuit of profit. The only real concern the Angels had was to ensure that the hard-won territory that netted them millions in drug sales each year would not be compromised. In the end, high-ranking American representatives from the mother chapters of the two clubs met up in Paris and, after lengthy talks and delicate negotiations, agreed terms.

The Angels wanted Scandinavia to themselves and
planned to be the dominant MC throughout the whole region. Just so long as the Bandidos agreed not to open up any more chapters in the area, they would be left alone.

A rag-tag collection of small, independent biker gangs with curiously unconventional names had been a mainstay of Nordic subculture since the late sixties, but it wasn’t until 1979 that the Galloping Goose MC moved into the big time and became an official prospect chapter for the Hell’s Angels. The Angels’ Amsterdam chapter, formed in 1977, was already taking advantage of lax local drug laws to reap massive profits. The Denmark chapter was expected to do the same by seizing control of Copenhagen’s lucrative hash and pot trade.

Much of this business took place in Christiania, a former army base in the south east of the city that was taken over by hippies in the 1970s and turned into a self-contained commune with its own government and education system. Drugs were legal there and more than $100,000 of dope changed hands on a daily basis, but the biker gang that supplied the drugs, Bullshit MC, refused to let anyone else have a piece of the action.

The Copenhagen chapter of the Angels received its full charter on New Year’s Eve 1980 and soon afterwards its leader, a fearsome thug by the name of ‘Blondie’ Nielsen, declared war on the Bullshit. After receiving a tip-off that four of the gang were in a city bar, Nielsen walked in alone, drew his knife, cut the throats of two of his rivals and stabbed a third before the fourth had even had time to react.

The Angels then went after Bullshit president Henning
Norbert Knudsen (‘Makrel’), emptying the magazine of a sub-machine gun into his body as he stood outside his home. He died instantly. Over the course of the next five years, at least ten more bikers died, so utterly decimating the ranks of the Bullshit that it no longer existed as a club. The Angels had achieved their goal and assumed total control of Denmark.

In 1990, the Angels expanded into Sweden using their tried and trusted technique of choosing the most suitable candidates. They would visit the country, party with a few clubs, then sit back and watch them fight with one another over the chance to wear the death’s head patch. The last club standing would win. In Sweden, that club was the Dirty Draggles (Swedish for ‘scum’) based in the port city of Malmö, directly across the Øresund strait from Copenhagen. Following a violent struggle with two other local clubs, the Draggles received their charter in late 1993, much to the chagrin of the Morbids MC.

Based in Helsingborg, just thirty miles north of Malmo, and led by Michael ‘Joe’ Ljunggren (the man Boone had met and befriended in Marseille), the Morbids were furious that the Angels had chosen the Draggles and not given them a chance to prospect at all.

Despite having signed the Paris agreement, the Danish Bandido leader, ‘Big’ Jim Tinndahn – a man every bit as formidable as Blondie Nielsen – had no intention of sticking to it. In early 1994, he approached the Morbids and offered them the chance to join him and give the Angels a real run for their money. Joe called Boone to let him know what was happening.

‘You’re asking for a lot of trouble if you go down that road,’ Boone told him.

‘I know, but we will have trouble anyway. You know what the Angels are like. They want to take over the whole country. Since they came to Sweden, we have done nothing but put them down. Sooner or later they will try to destroy us. At least if we become Bandidos, we might be able to survive.’

The development was discussed at the next national church meeting of the Midland Outlaws, and soon afterwards Boone called Joe back with the club’s view of the situation. ‘We say, fuck ’em,’ Boone told his friend. ‘Don’t pay attention to anything the Angels are telling you. Put up the Bandidos patch. Don’t let them push you around. Go for it.’

True to form, the Angels sent a couple of associates to visit the Helsingborg clubhouse and shoot it up. No one was injured in the attack, but soon afterwards the Angels opened up a prospect chapter of their own in Helsingborg. Now the scene was set for the war everyone had feared to begin in earnest. And Joe Ljunggren was right on the front line.

By the time Boone and the other Midland Outlaws returned from Florida, there had been another gun attack on the Morbids clubhouse in which one of the Bandidos had the end of his finger shot off. Then there had been an exchange of gunshots at a Bandidos party which had left one HA hangaround dead and three others wounded. Shootings were now taking place in Helsingborg on an almost daily basis.

While the Midland Outlaws still struggled to find weapons and had to travel abroad in order to receive proper firearms training, the Nordic bikers had no such difficulties. At the time, all the Scandinavian countries had
mandatory military training for virtually all males over the age of seventeen, which meant that most of the members on both sides of the conflict had already completed their service. They not only knew how to fire a range of pistols, rifles and sub-machine guns but they had also been trained in the use of anti-tank weapons, land mines and hand grenades. Furthermore, they knew exactly where they could find these.

In order to support their civilian militias in the unlikely event of war, both Sweden and Denmark had established a network of small arms depots throughout the countryside. The buildings were unguarded and relatively insecure, but this had never been a problem. Knowing their importance to national defence, no one had ever breached one.

Then the bikers came along. In a series of thefts, by both the Bandidos and the Angels, around 300 handguns, 272 rifles, ten machine guns, sixteen anti-tank rockets, hundreds of hand grenades and some seventeen kilos of plastic explosives were taken before the authorities wised up and began securing the depots. One of these anti-tank rockets was fired at the HA clubhouse in Helsingborg soon after the first theft, though no one had been injured.

The shootings challenged the public perception of the Nordic biker gangs who up until then had benefited from incredibly positive PR. In the ten years prior to the first attack, the Angels clubhouse in Copenhagen had received a substantial amount in government grants (subsidised by the liberal Danish state as a place where people could enjoy their ‘hobby’). High street shops dedicated to selling t-shirts and other biker novelties in support of the clubs could be found all over Scandinavia. Some children even dressed up
as bikers at Halloween. The battles were just about tolerated because the bikers were only killing each other. So long as the public were not involved, they seemed content to let the MCs get on with their war.

By June the fighting had spread to Finland and led to the death of the president of the Klan MC, a prospect club for the Bandidos. Increasingly alarmed by what was going on overseas, Sonny Barger summoned the leader of the Swedish HA to California and arranged for talks with the central command of the Bandidos, with a view to reminding them about the Paris pact. But the pact did not cover Sweden and the Morbids were eager to avenge the attacks the HA had carried out on them. Further talks took place when a group of American Bandidos visited the Hell’s Angels in Denmark and Sweden, but they too failed to come to an agreement.

Back in the UK, rumours began to circulate that the Midland Outlaws were about to become an official prospect club for the Bandidos. Boone and the others had no idea where this story came from, but they did everything they could to encourage it. From a PR point of view, they wanted to make the British Hell’s Angels as uncomfortable as possible and there was hardly a better way of doing this than to show their support for all those taking a stand against the HA.

As further provocation, Boone led a small group of Midland Outlaws to Sweden to attend a party co-hosted by Joe (now president of the Helsingborg chapter) to celebrate the opening of yet another Bandidos chapter.

The day after the party, the Bandidos proudly showed the
Outlaws around the clubhouse, which was built inside a large industrial complex. By now the constant state of war and use of high-grade military weapons had dramatically altered the design and layout of all new clubhouses. The security room had a large onyx table, above which hung a bank of dozens of security monitors. Cameras pointed in all directions making it impossible for anyone to approach the site without being seen – the room was occupied at all times.

To the right of the control console was a large red button. This, Boone was told, was the emergency lockdown control. In the event of an emergency, all the doors in the building were automatically closed and secured shut with blasts of compressed air from a central reservoir. Bullet and blast proof, no one would be able to get into the building, though at the same time no one would be able to get out until the alert was over. With plenty of food and water as well as a generator, the club would be able to sustain itself in a locked-down state for several days. ‘If there is ever a nuclear war,’ one of the Bandidos announced to Boone, ‘this would be one of the best places to be.’

The following day Boone found out just how effective those security measures were. As he and his fellow Outlaws sat in the bar at the centre of the clubhouse unit, an alarm sounded and all the doors began to slam shut with incredible force and huge hisses of compressed air. One prospect only barely made it into the bar area after executing an Indiana Jones-style headfirst dive into the room.

‘We have a big problem,’ the prospect announced after catching his breath, ‘there are maybe 200 policemen with Heckler and Koch machine guns surrounding the clubhouse.’

‘Okay,’ said Boone, fighting to remain calm. ‘So what do we do?’

‘If they come in, you put your hands up.’

‘I know about putting my hands up. I mean what do we do until we get to that part?’

‘Oh, we just wait.’

An hour or so later the doors opened up and the alert status was downgraded. It turned out that the police had been unaware that the club had been patched over. Having received reports about a large number of Bandidos in the area, they feared the clubhouse had been attacked and expected to find a total bloodbath inside.

The Midland Outlaws returned to the UK and the war in Scandinavia raged on with a series of tit-for-tat exchanges taking place across the region. In February 1995, the fighting spread to Norway with a mass shootout between members of the Bandidos and the HA which, miraculously, ended with no injuries. The next major incident, however, would hit the Brits and Boone in particular far harder.

In July 1995 Joe Ljunggren, by then promoted to national president of the Bandidos, was riding his Harley on the major E4 highway in Sweden, on his way back from a party in Finland, when he was shot by a sniper who had secreted himself along the roadside. Although Ljunggren was travelling at more than seventy miles an hour, the gunman’s single bullet hit him at the base of his neck in an area not covered by the bullet-proof jacket he had taken to wearing at all times. He died instantly.

Joe’s close friends from the Midland Outlaws travelled to Sweden for the funeral. It was an impressive occasion, with massive limousines booked to carry the mourners to a large
cathedral just outside Helsingborg. The priest performed the service first in Swedish and then in English, for the benefit of the small British contingent. And at the end, they played Joe’s favourite song, ‘Wind of Change’ by the Scorpions.

Boone returned to England with two Danish Bandidos, including JJ, a close friend of Joe’s who had been riding with him just half an hour before the assassination. The plan was to attend the Rock and Blues show, but Joe’s absence put a real damper on the whole thing. The trio spent hours talking over their memories of the man and mourning their loss. A few days before the event opened up to the public, with the Midland Outlaws camped on the site in order to get it ready, half a dozen police officers turned up at the main gate.

‘We’re considering cancelling the event,’ the lead officer announced.

‘Why?’ asked Caz.

‘Because you’ve got Bandidos here and there’s just been another attack with an anti-tank rocket in Scandinavia. We don’t want to take the chance that it’s going to kick off here. We think the Hell’s Angels might try to hit back at you lot.’

Boone knew he had to inform his Bandido guests of what had happened. He made his way over to the portable cabin where the two men were sleeping and gently woke them up.

‘I’ve got some bad news I’m afraid,’ he said softly. ‘Something terrible has happened.’