OFF THE WIRE
A one-percenter is the one of a hundred of us who has given up on society and
the politician’s one-way laws.
This is why we look repulsive.
We are
saying we don’t want to be like you or look like you.
So stay out of our
face.
[...]
God forgives, Outlaws don’t
- The “Outlaws’
Creed”
Pop quiz: name the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle
(*club*).
I suspect most of you answered “Hells Angels,” the notorious
California-based organization that more or less invented outlaw biker culture as
we know it. But you would be wrong.
The Outlaws, founded in Illinois in
the early 1950s, actually has more members around the world than their
better-known rivals. But they’ve made a point of maintaining a lower profile
than the Angels — to the extent tough-looking guys on Harley-Davidson bikes,
wearing a skull-and-crossbones named “Charlie” on their backs, can keep any kind
of lower profile — and maybe that’s part of the reason they’ve become so
big.
That, and the fact they’ve proven they aren’t afraid to take on the
Hells Angels, or other outlaw biker (*club*), on their own turf. For decades,
the Angels and the Outlaws have been locked in a brutal, worldwide battle for
territory — win a city, state, or country and the (*club*) controls the drug
trade, prostitution, and other organized criminal activities.
The bloody
rivalry is described, in riveting detail, in Charlie and the Angels: The
Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the Sixty Years War by Alex Caine. Caine hasn’t
just studied the one-percenter lifestyle — he claims to have lived it, as an
undercover operative for police forces in Canada and around the world (“Alex
Caine,” needless to say, is a pseudonym).
Legend has it the newly formed
Outlaws sent messengers to the Hells Angels in the 1950s, proposing an alliance.
The Angels allegedly beat the tar out of the Outlaw ambassadors and sent them
back home with a two-word response I probably can’t repeat here. The rivalry got
worse during the turbulent ’60s, and except for a short-lived truce brokered at
the infamous Sturgis biker rally in 1984, it’s been total war ever
since.
The most fascinating parts of Charlie and the Angels describe the
network of support clubs and prospects set up to cultivate full-patch Outlaw
members. The third-largest American biker (*club*), the Bandidos, is closely
allied to the Outlaws (and often do much of their dirtiest work for them). Both
the Outlaws and the Hells Angels sponsor smaller clubs, usually in cities that
are just starting to open up to outlaw biker culture, which have different names
but wear the same colors as their parent organizations — black-and-white for
Outlaws, red-and-white for Angels.
In North America, police forces have
infiltrated the Outlaws and rival (*club*), often straddling the line between
merely reporting on criminal activities and actually encouraging them.
Interestingly, Caine notes in Germany and other European nations dealing with
the biker threat, such undercover operations aren’t allowed — leaving the police
with little to do until after the Angels or Outlaws do something illegal (the
Dutch, in a move that even the most jaded satirist couldn’t dream up, actually
built a clubhouse for the Hells Angels when they showed up in the
1970s).
Charlie and the Angels is a somewhat disjointed work that skips
around the world, and back and forth in time, giving the impression that many of
its chapters were initially written as stand-alone articles. But it is rare for
someone to infiltrate this mysterious, often romanticized world, and live to
tell about it. That alone makes the book well worth reading.
Caine admits
to a kind of grudging respect for the Outlaws, for how the club has been able to
survive and thrive for so long. “If drugs became legal tomorrow, that would be
the end of the Hells Angels,” he writes, “but I’m convinced the Outlaws would
survive. If the Outlaws lost everything, the houses, the cars, the money, they
would get on their bikes and tear up a stretch of highway, looking to see what
was over the hill.”
http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/4573/a-rare-look-inside-the-outlaw-biker-culture.html
