Pubdate: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Copyright: 2006, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168 Author: Terry Ott Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?188 (Outlaw Bikers) Note: Terry Ott is a Hamilton journalist who has written previously on the Hells Angels and organized crime. ANGELS WITH DIRTY WINGS The Biker Trials: Bringing Down the Hells Angels By Paul Cherry ECW, 404 pages, $22.95 Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian Hells Angels By Jerry Langton Wiley, 250 pages, $24.99 'I will repeat again that being part of the Hells Angels is not a crime in itself. But we have surely proven to you that the organization is a gang in the sense of the Criminal Code, and that it is a criminal organization." Federal prosecutor Madeleine Giauque, closing statements to the court, February, 2004, from The Biker Trials. According to legend, the Hells Angels motorcycle club cum gang sprang up in northern California in the late 1940s, pulled together by a handful of bored former army air corps pilots and bike enthusiasts looking to drink more than a few beers, and raise a little hell. As their numbers grew through the 1950s, they were immortalized by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. In the 1960s, they associated for a good time with the Grateful Dead, and once, disastrously, they were the Rolling Stones' bodyguards at Altamont. Considered during that time to be a filthy menace and small-time dope dealers, but hardly masters of organized crime, the Hells Angels have grown immensely in their expertise and ability to control major drug-trafficking markets. The organization expanded into Canada in 1977 with a chapter in Laval, Que., fought a series of bloody bike-gang wars in the province throughout the 1980s, and became the dominant outlaw motorcycle club in Canada, with the Toronto chapter now said to be the largest in the world. Centred mostly in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, membership is estimated at between 500 and 2,000 full-patch, striker prospects (probationary members in training), and "hang-around" members throughout Canada. Police and prosecutors allege that the gang earns hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit drug sales and extortion, and kills at the drop of a hat, or dispute. However, the Hells Angels were dealt a major blow in 2001, as the result of massive police investigations and subsequent successful prosecutions, as explained by veteran Montreal Gazette journalist Paul Cherry in The Biker Trials. Cherry's excellent 400-page effort could safely have been subtitled Everything You Wanted To Know About The Hells Angels, But Were Too Scared To Find Out, such is the attention to detail and the vivid tales of motorcycle mob minutiae, including how the group sets up "puppet" gangs, essentially to do their dirty work. The book, chock full of interesting pictures of biker mugs in various poses, is ostensibly about the series of trials from 2002 to 2004 that badly damaged the Hells Angels and jailed its top leadership, including elite Nomad chapter members Maurice (Mom) Boucher and Hamilton, Ont., native Walter Stadnick, former national president of the gang. But it is also a detailed primer on the activities of the organization from the early 1980s to the present, with the main focus on Quebec HA nasty business. According to Cherry, the government finally nailed Boucher (who is appealing his murder conviction while facing a minimum 15-year sentence), Stadnick and other top Angels due to the work of informants and turncoat bikers who cut deals when faced with long prison terms. Boucher and Stadnick refused to co-operate and are still presumably held in high esteem by fellow HA members. Cherry also details how a successful government biker prosecution in Barrie, Ont., on gangsterism -- in which a member of an identified criminal organization can have a five-year term added on during the commission of any crime -- may hamstring the Angels in the 21st century. Conversely, former Hamilton Spectator reporter Jerry Langton's Fallen Angel focuses a narrative mostly on Walter (Nurget) Stadnick, whom many credit for peaceably bringing together a multitude of disparate bike gangs in Canada under the mantle of the Hells Angels. Langton may also answer the long-asked question as to origin of Stadnick's unusual nickname. According to an old acquaintance of Stadnick's featured in the book, "Nurget" may have referred to Walter's propensity for selling "nuggets" of hashish in the 1970s, prior to his big-time biker career. But then again, Langton notes, the nickname may originate from something else, or even mean nothing. And perhaps that is one of the problems with Fallen Angel: Stadnick, and HA since 1982, was and is so stealthy that little is really known about the reportedly 5-foot, 5-inch biker who is now serving at least 10 years in a federal pen for conspiracy to commit murder and drug dealing. After some boiler-plate on the history of the Hells Angels, the abbreviated Stadnick life story makes up the rest of the rather light 250 pages of Fallen Angel, in which Langton admits it was tough getting people even to talk about the small but tough, and much-feared, Angel. Langton may also rely too much on a Hamilton police point of view, with sources such as "Bob the cop" who, along with his colleagues, had many years to take Stadnick down, but ultimately failed to do so; the biker was eventually arrested by the feds while on vacation in the Caribbean. However, Langton does provide a rather newsy tidbit: He writes that Stadnick, while organizing HA business in Winnipeg prior to his arrest, enjoyed a sort of parallel domestic life, living with a woman in similar circumstances to his common-law partner of two decades in Hamilton. Also, Langton debunks a myth that Ozzy Osbourne had partied after a concert at the Angels' Hamilton clubhouse. Notwithstanding published reports, Langton writes, the Ozzman did not cometh, though some of his roadies apparently were the guests of honour. And in an only-in-Hamilton-type tribute, at least one major downtown bookseller has placed copies of Fallen Angel behind the counter, an admission, they say, that the book may be popular enough to be picked up without first being paid for. Despite my minor quibbles with Fallen Angel, both it and The Biker Trials are serious, worthy additions to outlaw bikerology, and should be required reading for those interested in the genre, or any true-crime story, for that matter. Both efforts, I think, make it quite clear between the lines that, although the Hells Angels' top two executives are on forced sabbatical, the gang, known as "the Big Red Machine," revs on. In spite of the busts, convictions and new laws, this much is clear: The Angels, who have recently embarked on public-relations campaigns to soften their image and argue their Charter rights, are badly nicked, but not nearly fully negated. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman