Hells Angels. - Hell to pay: hells angels vs. the million-dollar rat

In his youth, he was known as Big Mike, mainly because of his bulging biceps and chest muscles. He was also known as Sherman because he was built like a Sherman tank.

In 2002, the stocky weightlifter, Michael Dollard Plante, began working as a bouncer at Vancouver's Marble Arch strip cluba job he got with the help of an aspiring Hells Angels member named Randy Potts. At the time, Potts was in the Hells Angels programthe four-step process to attaining full membership in the world's most notorious outlaw motorcycle gang.

Plante often exchanged small talk with bikers at his local gym and, over time, began working out with members of Vancouver's East End chapter of the Hells Angels. Eventually he began advising them on weightlifting regimens to help them bulk up their bodies, as well as supplying them will illegal steroids.

One of them, Lloyd Louie George Robinson, invited Plante to lift weights with him at the East End chapter clubhouse, which was located on East Georgia Street. Robinson, then in his mid-40s, was a senior member of the East End Hells Angels and his half-brother, John Peter Bryce, was the chapter president.

The Hells Angels, whose first chapter was established in Oakland, California, now has chapters spanning the globe. The Angels first began spreading their tentacles into Canada in the 1970s, expanding across the country and eventually establishing more than 30 chapters. The East End chapter, considered one of the wealthiest and most powerful chapters in the country, was founded in 1983, when a local biker gang, the Satan's Angels, with three chapters in the Vancouver area and one in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, were patched over to become part of the Hells Angels.

The bikers' lair was the East End clubhouse, fortified with surveillance cameras and steel doors with numeric keypads. It contained a private bar, lounge, meeting room, two bedrooms and a full gym.

Robinson, impressed by the results of his body-building buddy, began asking Plante to be his spotter during weightlifting sessions. At one point, Plante watched Robinson bench-press more than 400 pounds. His Hells Angels colleagues were impressed.

Plante soon gained a reputation as a reliable friend of the Hells Angels and they began throwing extra work his way. In addition to his job as a bouncer at the Marble Arch, after hours Plante worked as an enforcer for the bikers, acting as the hired muscle on debt collections to help intimidate people who owed money. His job was to convince debtors that they would have a lot less griefand painif they simply paid up.

Often all it took was a mean look and even meaner threats, but, if necessary, he would use force to get people to pay what they owed. Sometimes he packed a gun. In January 2003, he went to threaten a man who had stolen Randy Potts' hangaround vest. When the thief emerged from his house, Plante fired a .45-caliber pistol in the air three times. I had gone there to scare him, bluff him out, Plante recalled, adding that he wore a balaclava so he could not be identified.

While Plante's career path involved seven assaults, most of the witnesses seemed to get cold feet and refused to report the matters to police. He did have one conviction for assaulting a man at a gym.

Then came the event that proved pivotal in his decision to become a police mole.