I’m in Maryland and most of the Harley riders I’ve seen tooling down the highway these days seem to be older than I am, and I’m 50. Are the feared motorcycle gangs of years past still a real threat to law and order?
I think what you’re seeing is the fact that Harleys are so expensive that only the “older” guys can afford them.
And I think the biker gangs mostly stick to warmer climates (like the Southwest).
Lots of biker gangs in Southern Finland (and elsewhere in Scandinavia). Hardly a warm climate.
Disclaimer: I have no data on this whatsoever. Only anecdotes from having an uncle who was involved in this sort of thing, but I thought they might be of interest until someone finds some good statistics.
I can’t speak for anywhere else, or even necessarily very many gangs, but the bikers I was familiar with in the Las Vegas area did all tend to be a bit older. Most of them would have been old enough to have served in Vietnam and I got the impression that there weren’t too many guys of younger generations joining up. When I was aware of pledges and things like that, they tended to be men who were friends and peers with current members or else they were coming in from another gang for one reason or another. I can only recall a few times when a significantly younger man was hanging around for this purpose.
However, just because they were old didn’t mean they didn’t cause problems. They might’ve been grizzled, tattooed grampas who did toy runs for charity, but they also occasionally got into lethal fights.
I got the impression that this particular form of gang was going to die out as the older men did, with the few younger ones drifting off towards some other form of organization.
I think the same way.
Not a copper, but they’re one of the more organised parts of “organised crime” in Australia, pretty much running the meth market, as well as being a primary vector for guns and more than a few protection rackets (I’ve heard tattoo parlours as one of the businesses you can’t run without paying tribute, and the recent spate of firebombings of them seems to attest to this).
I’ve also got a Hells Angels clubhouse down the road from me, and every few weeks there’s an incredible ammonia stench radiating from it.
YMMV.
A few years ago here, the cops broke up a motorcycle gang (they called themselves a “sportsmen’s club”) who had been pretty heavy into drug dealing and branched out to include murder.
They weren’t old and they didn’t ride Harleys. I think they rode Honda Goldwings.
Two months ago, The LA Times profiled the a major raid on the Mongols bike gang here in California. As with many other bike gangs, among the numerous charges were trafficking and distributing meth.
Harely’s are old man bikes, they’re too expensive (usually like 5x-10x the price of other bikes).
There are still some biker gangs around, definitely, though they’re not as prevelant. There was a house near one of the places I lived in college (Santa Cruz, Ca) about a block away that was home to Hell’s Angels. They were cool guys, and shut the street down once or twice for a huge street party, built up a stage and had bands playing, keg in a garage, that sort of thing. A lot of bikers also used to ride up and down the coast on nice days, you’d see 'em go by in huge groups, just goin for a nice ride on a nice a day
Actually the opposite. The criminal biker gangs (as opposed to the guys who just like to ride motorcycles together) that used to work in the Southwest got driven out by Mexican organized crime outfits. The bikers decided that Canada was an untapped field for organized crime where they wouldn’t have to compete with existing gangs. So groups like the Hells Angels ended up running drugs in Quebec.
Amusing story: I was driving in my mini-van with wife and kids up I-5 near Bellingham Wa. when a moderate size group of guys on motorcycles passed me, I noticed their jackets said “Bandido’s” and I thought to myself “There aren’t really biker gangs are there? These are probably just regular guys”
When I got home I asked some people I know that are into Harleys etc., they told me those are the people that do the real dirty work for the Hells Angels. Since then I’ve been reading about the various cases against some of these groups in the area, so there definitely are some.
That’s weird. In the Nordic Countries, Bandidos and Hell’s Angels are rival gangs who “often” fight it out really dirty. I remember an episode maybe 10 years ago when a Bandido member shot an RPG into a Hell’s Angels Clubhouse in Copenhagen.
The coppers in Australia are acutely aware of the Angels’ manufacturing and mercantile activities, and have obviously chosen to turn a blind eye in this instance, perhaps in hope of snaring ‘bigger’ fish.
Either that, or the bikies are just really finnicky and anal about cleaning their dunnies.
Bandidos, Hell’s Angels, Mongols, Son’s of Silence, Los Foesteros’ (sp), Grey Horse, Booze Fighters, Black Ribbon 5th Chapter, Outlaws, Loaners, Jokers, etc.
And what you hear, what you think & what you know is probably mostly wrong. To really know you kinda got to be there and you really don’t want to do that.
YMMV
Under And Alone is a story about an undercover agent who infiltrates the Mongols motorcycle club in the Southern CA area about 10 years ago. Interesting read, and they are making it into a movie… I’m not so sure about Mel Gibson as the lead in it, but it should be interesting to see when the movie comes out.
There are bikers, and there are motorcycle riders–two different animals.
The Bandidos were founded about 20 miles south of my home back in the sixties. I even knew the founder, Don Chambers; also, an old friend of mine’s little brother was a Bandido. The younger brother was killed on his bike, and the funeral was a madhouse of bikers–his mother was a nice lady, and I knew very well, was reduced to hysteria.
The gangs often form uneasy alliances, but do not trust each other–kinda like Germany and Russia prior to WWII.
There was a recent ten-part (?) series on TV called the Sons of Anarchy–highly Hollywoodized, but a fair depiction. Make a search, and read the comments made by bikers on the message board. Enlightening!
Many years ago I was a hog rider, and on the fringe.
Trust me–the One-Percenters are still out there.
Well the accuracy of the relationship could certainly be in question, this was just some guy that was familiar with the name, but it did at least confirm to me that they weren’t just regular guys out for a ride.
Geez, biker gangs are major organized crime forces in Canada. They are the foremost organized crime group well above the Mafia. In the 1990s turf wars killed 150 people in Quebec including a little kid who happened to be standing in front of what turned out to be a biker gang’s headquarters when a car bomb went off.
The FBI figures for the Hell’s Angel’s is some outrageous figure like, they make about 1 billion a year from drug trafficking. (I’d have to look up a cite though.)
A couple years ago, there was a raid at one of their biggest clubhouses, just a few blocks away from me.
These days the typical person riding a Harley Davidson is over 50, obese (with a beer gut that out of proportion to their overall obesity), wears black leather clothes made from the cheapest hides, wears a bandana, has a bad haircut, sports cheap tattoos and has a scraggly beard.
Now that’s just the women. The men look even worse.