Showdown: How the Outlaws, Hells Angels and Cops Fought for Control of the Street

OFF THE WIRE
Source: Kansas City Info Zone

There was a time when two young, ambitious bikers, Mario “the Wop” Parente and Walter Stadnick, from Hamilton, Ontario took control of the streets.
San Francisco, CA - infoZine - They started off as fellow riders, but as time went on they became sworn enemies and the national presidents of the two toughest gangs in Canada: the Outlaws and Hells Angels.

Showdown: How the Outlaws, Hells Angels and Cops Fought for Control of the Streets (Jossey-Bass; October 2010; Paper; $26.95) is the inside story of the street war between these two violent biker gangs. Woven together from interviews with police officers, informants, and members of the various biker gangs, including Outlaws president Mario “The Wop” Parente, author Jerry Langton exposes the world of Canada’s organized crime as never before.

What follows is the biker gang equivalent of the Godfather, as Stadnick makes moves into Ontario and Parente vows to protect his turf from Stadnick's vision of making the Hell's Angels the largest criminal biker gang in the country.

Meanwhile, the police and the public will not tolerate an all-out biker war. The Hamilton police, OPP and Sûreté du Quebec combine forces to launch Project Retire and bring down the Outlaws, a sweep that has unintended outcomes for the balance of biker power in Ontario.


Jerry Langton grew up in Hamilton and studied journalism. He wrote for The Hamilton Spectator and Maclean's and was a deputy editor for The Daily News in New York. Currently Langton is a freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star and the National Post. He is the author of Biker: Inside the Notorious World of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang , Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian Hells Angels and Rage: The True Story of a Sibling Murder .

Showdown: How the Outlaws, Hells Angels and Cops Fought for Control of the Streets
Jerry Langton
ISBN: 978-0-470-67763-6
Paperback
272 pages
October 2010
US $26.95