Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jul 2006
Source: Province, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2006 The Province
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/theprovince/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476
Author: Elaine O'Connor
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?188 (Outlaw Bikers)

ANGELS TRULY A HELLISH GANG

BIKERS: New Book Is A Catalogue Of Atrocities Against Innocent

They had not planned on beheading her.

The opening line of Canadian journalists Julian Sher and William 
Marsden's new book on the Hells Angels serves as a warning to 
readers: We're not in Canada anymore.

In their first biker book, Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs are 
Conquering Canada, Sher and Marsden set out to show that the Hells 
Angels are more than just a club of biker buddies -- that they are in 
fact a gang of hardened criminals who run drugs, launder money and 
murder rivals.

In their follow-up, Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers' Global Crime 
Empire, the authors aim to reveal that many members are more than 
street criminals and are really cold-blooded killers who maim women, 
dismember innocents and slice the throats of five-year-olds.

It makes for a chilling read.

One of the aims of the book, Sher told The Province in an interview, 
was "to say the murders and killings and violence that we've seen in 
Canada didn't just fall from the sky. That they came out of a 
particular breed and culture.

"There were some quite horrific stories of innocent victims and it 
was important to show that. Because to some degree, British Columbia 
so far has been spared what we saw in Quebec, even what we saw in 
Winnipeg with drive-by shootings," he said, citing deaths of 
innocents in other provinces.

Since they were founded by California outlaw Sonny Barger in 1957, 
the Hells have spawned a motorcycle-gang empire with an estimated 
2,500 full-patch members in 25 countries.

In Canada, the Hells have grown from one chapter in 1977 to 37 
chapters by 2002.

Road to Hell took readers into Canadian clubhouses, inside police 
investigations, and into the mind of biker informant Dany Kane. The 
focus was the brazenness of the Hells' expansion and business 
dealings: we saw them renting conference rooms at the Days Inn, 
buying homes down the street from police, plotting drug deals and 
hits in family diners. Civilian casualties -- notably Montreal prison 
guard Diane Lavigne and 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, slain by a 
1995 Hells car bomb -- were few.

Angels of Death presents this human carnage as a deliberate scare 
tactic. As it scans the rise of the Hells in the U.S., Australia, 
England, Europe, Canada and Scandinavia, it reveals virtually every 
state and country with a Hells chapter has its own Daniel or Diane.

There is Cynthia Garcia, the 44-year-old Arizona single mom lured to 
a clubhouse only to be abused, gutted, almost decapitated and dumped 
in a desert in 2001.

There is Joanne Wilson, a 24-year-old hotel maid in Amsterdam who 
started dating a Hells member and ended up a torso found floating 
down a city canal in 1985.

And there is Dallas Grondalski, a blond, blue-eyed five-year-old who 
was slashed at the throat and then shot in the head in her Northern 
California home by Hells in 1986 after they finished slaying her 
mother, stepbrother and father, a former member who tried to leave the club.

"By telling the story of Cynthia Garcia, of Dallas Grondalski and the 
young girl in Holland, Joanne Wilson," Sher said, "we wanted to bring 
it home that no one is really immune to them."

Angels of Death brings the danger of the Hells Angels home so 
forcefully it should come with an R rating. It's a brutal, bloody, 
revolting book -- and riveting.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman