outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, bandidos mc - book - 2009 - The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club
Alex Caine
Vintage
2009
222 pages

This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs.  Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.  

The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members.  Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs.

Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred.  According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution.  That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.

There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty.  

All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker.  Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood.

Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.  

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2008 - Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Alex Caine
Random House
2008
304 pages

Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau).  By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.

Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant.  He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty.

The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein.  In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.

The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club.  He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie.  This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture.  Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.

Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2002 - Ridin' High, Livin' Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories
Ralph “Sonny” Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman
Harper
2002
277 pages

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is a collection of fourty-one motorcycle related stories collected by Sonny Barger, the former national president of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and Keith and Kent Zimmerman, the twin brothers who collaborated with Barger on his 2000 autobiography, Hells Angel and also worked with John Lydon (also known as Johnny Rotten, the frontman for seminal punk group, The Sex Pistols) on his autobiography, Rotten.  Barger and the Zimmerman brothers present the reader with biker tales from a number of different aspects of motorcycle culture (many of them about 1% bikers) and demonstrate just how varied the subculture of motorcycle enthusiasts can be.

The book begins with the story 'The Wandering Gypsy and The Silver Satin Kid', with photos of the ‘kid’ showing a young Sonny Barger.  The story tells how Barger became the leader of the Oakland Hells Angels and thus transitioned motorcycling from a practice to a subculture in the popular imagination.  From this story of outlaw genesis, Barger and associates tell a number of stories that shine a light onto a number of lesser-known aspects of the motorcycling subculture, both outlaw and lawful.  

Many of the stories contained in Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free are stories of outlaws, some are tales of interaction with celebrities such as actor Steve McQueen, singer David Crosby, and outlaw country musician, Kinky Friedman.  Many of them are stories of kindness, done by or for outlaw motorcyclists, in an effort to oppose the stereotype of the maniac biker, however others are stories that detail the outrageous biker behavior we all expect from such a book.  ‘Blake’s World Record Whore-House Jump’ for example, describes a biker jumping a motorcycle into a brothel bedroom that was already in use by a fellow brother.  ‘On the Lam’ is a story of running from law enforcement personnel.  The most interesting stories, however, are those that highlight some aspect of biker culture that is seldom made visible by other media coverage.  One of the first stories describes a long running black biker club called the East Bay Dragons, a club that the Zimmermans have recently devoted a full book to, distorting the concept of the 1%ers as a purely white (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) phenomena. Other stories discuss the experiences of women bikers, and another story, 'The Ballad of Rocky's Green Gables,' discusses the conversion of an old biker bar into a Christian ministry and church....for bikers.  These stories illustrate how people of all kinds gravitate towards the technology of the motorcycle and make it mean more than a mode of transportation.

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is also interesting because it points towards something that simply must exist although its almost completely absent in literature.  That is, it points towards a folklore of counterculture.  In one sentence in A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney makes a passing reference to IRA folklore, but presents no examples of it.  Barger et. al. have created a volume of biker stories that has many similarities to folklore.  The authors even using the folklorist term of ‘capturing’ stories, to refer to their transcription of the tails included.  The stories of Ridin' High, Livin' Free are all told in what is presumably a outlaw vernacular of rough speech, and while many of the stories are probably based on a kernel of truth (with accompanying photographs of the people who populate them) they also often have a fantastic edge to their tellings that suggests the embellishments that build with repeated oral transmissions.  

The book also presents a fuller range of biker activities than other biker books and not the simply criminal that are represented by true crime authors and former undercover infiltrators, not is it bogged down by the rhetoric of a victim of social misconception.  Finally, Ridin' High, Livin' Free conveys the appeal of the activity of riding to the reader, an aspect of the subculture that should often be foregrounded but is actually often absent from too many biker books that instead focus on the wild lives of the people who join 1% clubs.

mongols mc, outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2008 - Honor Few, Fear None: The Life & Times of a Mongol

Honor Few, Fear None: The Life and Times of a Mongol
Ruben “Doc” Cavazos
HarperCollins
2008
214 pages

Honor Few, Fear None is the memoir of “Doc” Cavazos (born in 1957), the former international president of the Mongols Motorcycle Club.  The Mongols MC is one of the best known outlaw motorcycle gangs outside of the subculture’s “big four” (a law enforcement designation referring to the four largest outlaw groups: the Hells Angels, the Bandidos, Pagans, and Outlaws).  Much of the notoriety of the Mongols MC comes from a rivalry with the Hells Angels that peaked (in terms of press coverage) after a violent melee at a casino in Laughlin Nevada during the 2002 Laughlin River Run, a major annual biker gathering.  Two Hells Angels and one Mongol were killed in the course of an all-out brawl.  Doc was a high ranking Mongol that the time, although not yet president of the organization.  

Cavazos’ memoir focuses primarily on his life as a gang member.  He and his brother, Al (AKA Al “the Suit”, another former high-ranking Mongol) were raised by their father in the tough Highland Park neighborhood in the Northeast of Los Angeles.  Cavazos describes the violent climate of his neighborhood, and the necessity of joining a gang for protection from his social environment.  In his adolescence Cavazos joined The Avenues, a notorious gang affiliated with the Mexican Mafia and an eventual rival of the Mongols.  Doc described himself in typical gangster terms as someone who was always ready to act violently, and without fear, if a situation called for it, but not as someone who would instigate conflict. 

Doc also describes his personal life as an adult, presenting himself as a responsible worker and parent.  He has balanced his outlaw biker lifestyle with a career, having worked full-time as a professional radiologic technician at a Los Angeles medical institution.  Furthermore he raised his son, Ruben Jr., as a single father.  Ruben Jr. eventually became “Little Rubes”, a security professional, and a full patch member of the Mongols MC.  Doc entered the world of 1% bikers because of a desire to leave the gang life behind in lieu of adult responsibilities, but also to maintain an element of danger in his life - something he felt membership in the Mongols offered.

In 2005 an ATF agent named William Queen authored a book titled Under and Alone in which Queen describes his infiltration of the Mongols MC San Fernando Valley Chapter under the alias of Billy St. John.  Queen represented the Mongols as murders and rapists, which is exactly the image of outlaw bikers (and Mongols in particular) Cavazos attempts to contradict with his text.  I believe that Queen and other undercover infiltrators of the 1% gangs exaggerate the criminality of bikers for the purpose of entrenching the value of their own positions and the expense of their operations.  Cavazos, however, pulls too hard in the opposite direction, often making the claim in his text that the Mongols are not criminal at all and any crime that has occurred at the hands of a club member was either before his regime, due to the incompetence of other leaders, or due to a lack of discipline among individual members.  The club chapter that William Queen became a full patch member of while working undercover, for example, was infiltrated due to leader incompetence and lack of adherence to club rules.  Cavazos argued that chapter president Red Dog was simply building a membership for the dues each Mongol pays, and that so he could fuel a drug habit and let recruitment measures go slack.  Incidentally, that’s what other Mongols accuse Cavazos of.

Also the Laughlin River riot occurred, according to Doc, because of the incompetence of his presidential predecessor, Roger Pinney.  Meanwhile Doc discusses his management of the club in terms of building armies, and furthermore he speaks of incidents where he directly challenges Hells Angels to enter confrontation.  He considers it a show of disrespect for the Mexican Mafia to have had a security detail in place during a meeting with their representatives, even though the Mongols had a similar unit operating at the same meeting.  Finally, he suggests that much of the brutality attributed to the Mongols (and described in Under and Alone) occurred before he achieved command over the club.  He considers a Mongol to be an individual who is ready for violence and willing to return fire but at the same time he resents the violent stereotype of the biker that is conveyed in media.

Its difficult to know what to make of Cavazos’ memoir considering the events that occured shortly after its publication.  Honor Few, Fear None was published in June 2008, shortly thereafter in August ‘08 Cavazos was voted out of the club under at a meeting in Vernon California under accusation that he was stealing from his own organization.  In October ‘08 Doc, Lil’ Rubes, Al the Suit, and a number of other Mongols members were arrested in the climax of another ATF undercover operation called Operation Black Rain.  Cavazos pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering and is now accused of having turned government informant by his former 1% brothers.  As of this writing, the Mongols MC website lists the three ex-Mongols/Cavazos family members as ‘out-bad’ which I assume means they are out of the club in bad standing.  According to a number of news items about the fallout of Operation Black Rain, government prosecution demanded the trademark rights to the Mongols patches from Doc for the purpose of preventing their public representation.  My edition of Honor Few, Fear None has all Mongols patches blacked out in the photographs section.  Earlier this summer a judge returned the trademarks, legally, to the club, and I would be interested to see if any new editions have the patches featured again.

Ruben “Doc” Cavazos memoir is inconsistent with regards to how he represents himself and his former club.  In the undertaking of such a memoir however, what else could he do but attempt to strike a balance between presenting his men as resolute fighters in the face of violent ongoing rivalries, and presenting them as motorcycle enthusiasts who get a little rough when they party in the face of a public view of 1%ers as bloodthirsty maniacs?  Cavazos’ text is interesting simply because it shows how a recently active high-ranking biker talks about the subculture.

hells angels, outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2007 - Running With the Devil: The True Story of the ATF's Infiltration of the Hells Angels

Running with the Devil: The True Story of the ATF’s Infiltration of the Hells Angels
Kerrie Droban
2007
The Lyons Press
215 pages

Ahoy out there in the matrixnet.  I borrowed Running with the Devil: The True Story of the ATF's Infiltration of the Hells Angels from the Toronto Public Library.

Kerrie Droban is a Phoenix AZ based criminal defense attorney turned true crime and suspense fiction author.  Her 2007 book, Running with the Devil, explores the events of the Black Biscuits investigative operation undertaken by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to infiltrate the inner-workings of the Hells Angels in Arizona.  The publication of Droban’s book precedes the book No Angel, by Jay Dobyns, who was the lead agent of the operation, and ultimately became an unofficial full patch member of the Hells Angels Skull Valley AZ chapter.  Droban was thus the first to tell the story of Operation Black Biscuits.
   
Droban tells the story of Black Biscuits from the perspective of an external viewer to the scene, with an emphasis on the perspectives of the ATF undercover agents, undoubtedly because Droban had access to ATF documentation pertaining to the case.  Droban structures the text as a continuous narrative, and as such it creates questions as to how the narrative as its constructed by Droban is actually manifest in the documents that ground it.  For example, when Droban referrs to operative Bird’s state of mind, is that actually represented in the documents in some way?  Did Droban confer with Dobyns to accurately represent an inner-state or was she deploying artistic licence?  This isn’t to say that a reader has to take Jay Dobyn/Bird’s word for it when they’re reading No Angel, but No Angel does have a greater legitimacy on such matters as its told from an individual who was directly involved.  

The story of Running with the Devil is that Dobyns, referred to only as Bird through the text, goes undercover with a team of ATF agents as a chapter of the Solo Angeles outlaw motorcycle club in Arizona, and ingratiates himself with the Skull Valley chapter of the Hells Angels.  The operation lasts from 2002 to 2003, during which time Dobyns et. al. go from being Solo Angeles to becoming Hells Angels hangarounds, then prospects, then after staging the murder of a Mongol (a rival biker gang to the Angels) became full patch members.  Much of the book describes the delicate acting Bird and his associates perform to insert themselves into the world of Outlaw bikers and maintain their cover without actually committing crimes themselves.  The focus of the text is on Bird, his close calls with exposure, his relationship with his family, his relationship with the ATF, and his drive to go as deep as he can into the biker world.

Droban frames undercover work as a form of theatre, a mode of thought about such police-work that is, if I recall correctly, absent from Dobyn’s book, and also from William Queen’s Under and Alone, a 2002 memoir about infiltrating the Mongols Motorcycle Club.  Considering undercover policing to be theatre raises questions about the stage, where it ends, what are its limits.  Clearly, performing as a Hells Angel while actually employed as a federal agent has an intrinsic conflict embedded into it.  The question that can never be satisfactorily answered by these kinds of texts is whether or not, and how, was that conflict preserved.  The conflict within,  the biker who knows that he or she is a federal agent is necessary.  An actor on a space designated as stage does not have to worry about preserving the parts of themselves that are not the characters they play.  Droban manages to scratch at this inner conflict by representing scenes of strained interaction between Bird (in biker appearance) and his family, but also in portraying Bird’s drive, to go as far as he can with his Biker persona, as an ideal for ATF success.

There was one particularly important aspect of Droban’s text that I thought was underdeveloped.  Pretty well every figure depicted is little more than a one-dimensional tough guy with a nickname.  Kerrie Droban was a lawyer prior to becoming a true crime and suspense author.  I assumed, due to her experience as a defense attorney, that she would give the individual members of the Hells Angels a sense of humanity, however what she actually presents the reader with is a collection of mean men who say and do mean things.  Dobyns and Queen create a greater degree of depth for the outlaws in their portrayals.  Droban conveys the human in Bird and many of his law enforcement associates, however the other side are not given the same treatment.

Drogan’s text was an interesting although somewhat shallow portrayal of the events of Operation Black Biscuit. This shallowness may perhaps be a reflection of the materials she worked from; and while Jay ‘Bird’ Dobyns could speak from direct experience for his book, Drogan had to spark life to dry case documentation.  One area where Drogan’s telling of the events is superior to Dobyn’s is in regards to the practical matter of the investigations carried out by other Motorcycle gangs into the roots of the Solo Angeles MC.  Solo Angeles are a real MC based in Mexico, and Bird and associates were playing a dangerous game pretending to be a far-flung chapter of the club.  Furthermore, once they staged the murder of a Mongol, they knew they couldn’t perpetuate the ruse much longer, the Mongols would have to look for their lost member, and the lack of a lost member would be a suspicious thing.  Drogan considered a wide and interconnected world of biker clubs who keep tabs on one another.  Dobyns, by contrast, constructs the situation as himself in the middle of an Arizona Hells Angels vs Mongols rivalry.

There are a number of these books about federal investigations into outlaw motorcycle clubs, and the result is that they only focus on these clubs as criminal enterprises.  These books highlight the criminal side of the clubs although when they are read carefully a reader may notice that many of the club members are petty criminals at most.  The worst of them (Hells Angels members with the ‘Filthy Few’ patch on their cut) are experienced killers, or are habitually engaged in an illegal trade of some kind, but the clubs do not seem to have a systematic, organizational interest in any particular criminal enterprise.  There is no question that violence seems to occur wherever outlaw bikers are present, and that many bikers are indeed criminals, but many members are just weird guys who like that lifestyle.  They may be tough and willing to do violence, but there’s not any particular criminal commitment made by individual Hells Angels when they join the club.  William Queen, for example, noted that the Mongols chapter he infiltrated was constantly short of money, and always trying to come up with criminal to find cash but often fell through.  Much of the Hells Angels’ income has come from merchandising their deaths’ head logo.  They have even brought lawsuits against companies who have infringed on their trademark.  Droban’s final chapter, listing the charges against the Angels who were indicted as a result of Operation Black Biscuit, noted that while several of the Angels were handed prison terms, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges were dropped against everyone.  This was not the first time Hells Angels were unsuccessfully charged under RICO, as the US government has consistently been unable to prove that the Hells Angels have an organization-wide commitment to any particular criminal enterprise, despite counting many experienced criminals among their members.

Yesterday, in fact, the president of the Toronto chapter of the Hells Angels was sentenced  to six years in prison for drug charges.  According to the Toronto Star, "last month a jury found the bikers guilty of those charges but not guilty of belonging to a criminal organization."