William Marsden - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Empire of Crime

PART I

3.

PART II

6.

PART III

8.

PART IV

13.

PART V

16.

PART VI

17.

Hells Angels will continue to ride to the ends of the earth.
The sun never sets on a Hells Angel patch.
H ELLS A NGEL S ONNY B ARGER

They had not planned on beheading her.

But Cynthia Garcia needed to be taught a lesson. The forty-four-year-old single mother of six had committed a fatal error. Nobody disrespects the Hells Angels, especially in their own clubhouse. In their minds, the stupid bitch deserved to die.

It was a cool fall Thursday night in Mesa, Arizona, in October 2001. Ten bikers had just returned to the Hells Angels clubhouse after one of their favourite drinking holes shut down at 1:30 A.M. But the boys were still hungry for some action.

The clubhouse was in a rundown part of town just east of Phoenix, on a small street lined with busted-up pickups, faded brown palm trees and broken-down white fences. The Mesa headquarters was prettier than most biker hangouts, which often look more like bunkers than clubhouses. The local Angels had taken care to keep up appearances. The Spanish shingles on the slanted roof were not cracked; the white stucco wall was immaculate, except for a striking logotwo big yellow Death Heads bracketing the name Mesa in blood red. A Death Head also adorned the black mailbox on the sidewalk.

The winged Death Head is the Hells Angels proud emblem: an angry-looking skull with a helmet and feathers streaming behind him. Its frighteningas its meant to be: dont fuck with the Angels. Well eat you alive.

Inside the clubhouse, the Angels sent out one of their eager recruits to hunt down some women. He came back with Cynthia Garcia, five foot five and weighing 120 poundstiny compared to most of the beefy boozers in biker leather. She started drinking with the boys and having a good time, but then things turned nasty.

According to a gang officer who investigated her murder, They brought her back for some recreation, and she didnt want to recreate. So they beat her down. She still got mouthy with them. So they threw her in the trunk of a car and finished her off out in the desert. She was barely alive, beaten and bloody, when the three bikers whod taken it on themselves to deal with her dragged her out of the car and threw her on her back in the sand. They stabbed her repeatedly, according to a later confession from one of the killers.

I want to cut the bitchs head off, the confessed killer claimed one of his bikers said. But his knife was too dull to finish the decapitation, according to the same testimony.

A bad knife was the least of the bikers problems. They could not know that for one of the killers, the slaying of an innocent woman had pushed him over the edge: he would turn traitor, rat on his biker brothers and start working undercover for the police. In the end, he would help bring down not only the two bikers he said helped kill Garcia but more than forty Hells Angels from five states on murder and drug charges in the biggest federal sweep against the bikers in American history.

Half a world away, Don Hancock, the retired chief of the Criminal Investigations Branch in Western Australia, drove through a quiet suburban neighbourhood in Perth with his friend Lou Lewis. The two men had passed the day at the racetrack, won a bit of money and were now enjoying the serene pleasure of time well spent. As they pulled into Hancocks driveway, a powerful bomb positioned under his seat blew Hancock out of the car, shredding his body like a rag doll and killing him instantly. His friend died soon afterwards. A cellphone had triggered the bomb, and the outlaw biker who had dialled the number assured his mate that they wouldnt be charged for the call.

A year earlier, outlaw bikers had literally blown to bits a small town in Australias outback where Hancock had retired. The former police officer had fled but was relentlessly tracked down.

Australians call outlaw bikers bikies, but theres nothing friendly about the apparent diminutive. The murder of Hancock would launch a massive police investigation and inspire tighter laws designed to bring the bikies under control. But it was too late. Aussie bikies, bold imitators of their American brethren, had already become the countrys first nationwide crime syndicate, dominating Australias underbelly.

Three years later and another continent away, three bodies were discovered in a stream near the town of Eicht, in the southern Netherlands. This time, all three victims were elite bikers, members of the Dutch Hells Angels Nomads chapter, and one was the chapter president. Nomads are often the most powerful among fully patched bikers, not restricted to operations in a specific geographic turf. But not even Nomads are always immune to insider treachery.

It was late in February 2004. All had been shot several times point-blank, execution-style, their assassination sparked by the theft of 293 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $11 million. But this was much more than your usual burned drug deal. The murders revealed a hitherto undisclosed story in the outlaw biker chronicles: their international ties to Colombian drug dealers and narco-terrorists.

Police later arrested a member of the Hells Angels chapter in Curaao, an island in the southern part of the Caribbean that is part of the Dutch Antilles. The biker flipped and informed on thirteen Hells Angels Nomads back in Holland, who were then arrested and charged with the murders of their leaders.

The cocaine was reportedly shipped to Amsterdam, via the Angels new chapter in Curaao, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an insurgency group labelled narco-terrorists by the U.S. State Department. Police frequently compare the bikers to terrorist organizations because of their explosive violence and cell-like structure, and the killings in the Netherlands revealed direct connections between the two.

For the first time, Dutch authorities, who had been notoriously reluctant to take on the countrys Hells Angels, the most powerful bikers in Europe, decided to act. Justice officials investigating the murders eventually charged almost the entire Nomads chapter, not just with murder and cocaine smuggling but also with being part of a criminal conspiracy. Their trial would send shock waves through the European biker underworld.