Alex Caine - Charlie and the Angels. The Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the Sixty Years War

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2012 Alex Caine

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Caine, Alex
Charlie and the Angels: the Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the sixty years war / Alex Caine.

eISBN: 978-0-307-35896-7

1. Outlaws (Gang)History. 2. Hells AngelsHistory. I. Title.

HV6486.C348 2012 364.1066 C2012-901430-8

Cover image: BORIS ROESSLER/epa/Corbis

v3.1

To Tom and Elizabeth
who are my amazing grace

I can just picture how it went down.

Larry Pooler, a former Para-Dice Rider and now a full-patch member of the London, Ontario, motorcycle club Hells Angels, leaned against the counter anxiously tapping the straw from his Coke on the wooden top.

As head of 2-4 The Show Productions, he was the promoter of the bike show taking shape around him. There was the hustle and bustle of tables going up and vendors setting out their wares for the day ahead. He thought about heading over to the Hells Angels display to grab his body armour, but it was early still. He was like a kid waiting to take a girl on a first dateall ready to go and jittery but with hours left to kill.

Everywhere he looked, Pooler saw other Angels wandering through the London arena, stopping to look at displays or greeting each other, hands clasped and arms thrown around shoulders.

These were brothers. And the strength of that brotherhood was soon to be tested.

Members of the Jackals street gang scurried around the displays, on errands for their Hells Angels masters. These guys made Pooler the most nervous. The puppet club wanted badly to prove its worth. After a botched shootout the month before, they had a score to settle with the Outlaws. Theyd gone after a former Outlaws chapter president, Thomas Hughes, a diehard who had refused to turn colours in the Angels recent push to absorb or eliminate the local Outlaws. But the street crew had underestimated their target and Hughes had rewarded one of them with a bullet in the gut.

The sense of anger and embarrassment the young gangsters were still feeling, coupled with their inexperience, could lead them to jump the gun today. And Pooler knew that timing would be everything. The Angels wanted all of their rivals, including the Wop, in the building before the shit hit the fan. As Pooler fidgeted and watched, he wondered how many Outlaws would show.

Back at their downtown Toronto clubhouse, a two-hour drive northeast of here, the Angels had decided that today would be their decisive confrontation with the Ontario Outlaws. A winner-take-all showdown. The two clubs and their supporters would have at most fifteen minutes of free-for-all before enough police reinforcements arrived to break it up. Until then, security would be negligible, mostly rent-a-cops and some Toronto biker-unit detectives hovering and taking pictures. A few local cops with nothing else to do would probably be there as well, maybe hoping for a minor dust-up or two so they could get some licks in.

The order of the day: maximum damage in minimum time.

The Outlaws prospect drove the van and trailer through the fairgrounds and into the vendors entrance of the arena. It was his job to set up the Outlaws table and put a couple of freshly chopped bikes on display. As he pulled up to their spot on the arena floor he saw all the biking paraphernalia a rider could want: helmets, chrome crank covers, high-polish exhaust pipes. In the aisles around him, people were busily hanging Harley-Davidson T-shirts and belts and every other kind of clothing they figured they could sell to the expected crowd. Looking up and down the arena floor, he realized something. It was thick with Angels and their supporters.

He told the other prospects with him to leave their patches in the van. Something was very wrong.

While they got out and started setting up, the driver stayed in the van and picked up his cell phone. Call in when you arrive, hed been told, once youve had a good look at whos at the show. He dialled and asked to talk to the Wop.

After the nervous prospect said his piece, the man on the other end took the news in stride. He had already dispatched three Outlaws vehicles southwest to Windsor, where they were to pick up some friends coming across the border from Detroit. His troops should be back in town by now, or very close to it. The Wops Outlaws would enter the arena en masse. And the Bandidos would be right beside them.

At Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) headquarters in London, a small group of squad leaders gathered to discuss the storm brewing at the fairground arena. They had some decisions to make. The cops knew the Outlaws would want to show the Bandidos that they were ready to spill as much Hells Angels blood as necessary to defend their turfand then somejust to prove to the Americans that the beaten-down Ontario Outlaws were worthy of their alliance.

That the Outlaws were lining up at a bike show against members and supporters of the Hells Angels, and were doing so with their numbers bolstered by the Bandidos, was no coincidence. Yes, gang members fight over disputed territory all the time. But two hundred of them at once? That was unheard of in Canada. But a few of those cops were old enough to remember something similar happening only about 150 kilometres south of here. It had been almost a carbon copy of the scene taking shape at the bike show. And those who werent old enough to remember it sure knew how it had ended.

In March 1971, police had gotten word that the Breed MC were planning to confront the Hells Angels at a bike show in Cleveland, Ohio. The Breed were a two hundredstrong biker gang from the New Jersey area. Cops werent sure what their beef was on this occasion, but sensing disaster they contacted the Angels and advised them not to show. Some out-of-town Angels were already on their way and never got word, and twenty-seven of them arrived at the show. Fortunately for them, many of the Angels friends and small support clubs had come too. Still, that left them badly undermanned. Some 160 Breed members stepped up to about 70 Angels and friends, one yelled Now! and the east-coasters attacked. A large number of police arrived minutes after it started, but the carnage was well underway. The days final count was one dead Angel, four dead Breed and two dead Angel supporters. All died of stab wounds and blunt-force trauma. Dozens were taken to the hospital and fifty-seven were arrested. Afterwards some of the Breed leaders admitted that they had had no reason for the initiating the confrontation except the thrill of the brawl.