"According to Vic Bettencourt, the first Hell's Angles motorcycle club was formed around 1948 in Berdoo, an offshoot from a renegade group called the Pissed Off Bastards out of Fontana, California. It was right after the Hollister incident. WWII vets from Berdoo -- who belonged to the Pissed Off Bastards -- used to roar by on their bikes. People would look up and say, "There goes one of those Hell's Angles."

There have been many books and movies about the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club (HAMC) but no inside definitive source of information about this well known but mysterious club has surfaced until now with the release of Sonny Barger's book. Sonny was not the founder of the Hell's Angles but was instrumental in providing the leadership that allowed the club to expand to over 100 chapters worldwide with only a third of those in the United States.

Sonny always saw himself as similar to the character Chino, played by Lee Marvin in the movie The Wild One.

This book was written from Sonny's viewpoint and uses his colorful and explicit language to drive home the importance of the brotherhood that he led. In another quote Sonny says:

"The story of the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club is the story of a very select brotherhood of man who will fight and die for each other, no matter what the cause."

In the beginning Sonny just wanted to find a group of guys who liked to ride motorcycles who would come together in a club to be like a family to him. Finding men strong enough to become a true brotherhood was a slow process. New recruits had to undergo a period of evaluation to prove they would never let down their brothers and always support the club, no matter what.

Along the way, the club found itself in direct opposition to law enforcement for a variety of infractions. Should any Hell's Angel member have a run-in with the law, all the other Hell's Angles members were expected to support that member even if it meant putting up bail money or hiring a legal team to fight the charges. Sonny's concept of a strong club was not to be found in other organizations where at the first sign of trouble the members abandon each other. His club was more like an angry swarm of bees intent solely on protecting the hive from any external force.

The symbol of the Hell's Angles is an Air Force-like patch containing a skull wearing an aviator's cap set inside a set of wings. This patch is sacred to the Hell's Angles. It can only be worn by a member and the patch itself belongs to the club, not the individual.

Sonny credits the club members for having a heavy influence on the development of Choppers and custom motorcycles.

The most well known incident involving the Hell's Angles was the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway in November of 1969. The Stones had asked the club to provide security for the event. Through a series of incidents during the concert, a man rushed the stage waving a gun and was killed by a knife after he shot a Hell's Angles member. Sonny does not say who had the knife. He does say that it was lucky that more people including the Stones hadn't been shot by this guy and that he felt the Hell's Angles had done their job.

Over the years Sonny had quite a few run-ins with the law. By his own account he had 21 arrests with few convictions the longest being a stint of 59 months for conspiracy.

He gives stories of the most well known members of the club, how they got their reputations, and how most of them died. Violence and death seem to be part of being a Hell's Angel. Sonny speaks of the long motorcycle corteges that the club participated in to honor fallen brothers. The Police Department used to laugh when they saw a mile-long parade of motorcycles. Sonny says now even the cops do the same thing when a cop dies.

Sonny has been a technical advisor on many motorcycle films depicting the Hell's Angles. He expects to see his new book made into a movie as well.

Sonny has since moved from California to just outside Phoenix, Arizona where he now runs a motorcycle repair shop. He belongs to the Cove Creek chapter of the Hell's Angles.

This book contains 51 black and white pictures depicting Sonny's life over the past 40 years. If you want to learn first-hand just what the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club stands for you'll want to read this book. I have to warn you that the language is strong and you may be shocked at some of the events described. Viewed from within the club these events were just another day in the life of a Hell's Angel. Only Sonny can assist you to understand why these events occurred and why they often were beyond anyone's control.

There are many motorcycle clubs today but only one Hell's Angles. Read the book to find out why.

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VENTURA, Calif. - The hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-fisted phenomenon of the Hells Angles Motorcycle Club was kick-started not on America's highways, but in the world's deadly and bleeding fields of war.

The Angles have grown, in the past 50 years, to include three dozen chapters in the United States, a presence in 15 countries and a worldwide membership estimated in the thousands.

But before all that, before roving bands of unwashed malcontents began riding the wild West astride iron horses like so many gun-slinging outlaws, before they tore open America's fabric and sewed themselves into the tapestry of mainstream culture, before they bathed and broke out as businessmen, before all that, their name belonged to other Angles.

"Hells Angles" was a name long favored by mercenaries and soldiers, warriors and troops who risked all for principle, belief, freedom and individual rights - including the right to ride big Harley-Davidson hogs. The history of today's Hells Angles is obscured by the hazy exhaust of half a century of Harleys, and no one can see through quite to the beginning.

But many believe the original Angles were members of the U.S. Army's 11th Airborne Division, an elite group of paratroopers trained to rain death on the enemy from above, drifting in behind the lines of battle.

They called themselves the Hells Angles because they flew on silk wings into hell itself, bringing a brutal hope for peace with 20 pounds of TNT strapped to each leg. The nickname was a badge of honor, a mark of invincibility, a wartime emblem indicating the toughest of the tough. It was a totem to ward off the worst.

Not surprisingly, a handful of those original Hells Angles - along with many other returning soldiers who had awakened to the nightmare of war - found it difficult to settle into the half-sleep of the American Dream. After living on the edge so long, they found only a depressing fatalism and monotony in jobs, family, mortgages, college, suburbia and cookie-cutter houses with white-picket fences.

And so they rode. Motorcycles were cheap in the mid-1940s, sold as military surplus, and they offered a certain wild peacetime freedom not unlike the wartime skies of Europe. Soon, individuals gathered into groups, sharing weekends when they rode hard and partied harder.

But when Monday came, not everyone went home. Some stayed, turning the weekend motorcycle club into a surrogate family of full-time brothers.

Two of the first such fraternities were the Pissed Off Bastards and the Booze Fighters, groups that established early the notoriety of the outlaw biker image. In 1947, at an American Motorcycle Association convention in the drowsy town of Hollister, Calif., the Pissed Off Bastards rode in drunk, wild and destructive, landing as if behind enemy lines with a belly full of TNT. The local sheriff later described the scene as "just one hell of a mess."

Quick to control the public relations' damage, the AMA denounced the Bastards, saying it was unfortunate that 1 percent of motorcyclists should ruin it for the law-abiding 99 percent. To this day, the 1 percent insignia remains a badge of honor, worn with pride by those who define themselves as not part of that milquetoast 99 percent majority who ride whining Hondas back and forth to the office.

But in the months following Hollister, internal tension among the Bastards and Booze Fighters was mounting, and in 1948 Bastard Otto Friedli broke from the club, splintering the group to create the Hells Angles Motorcycle Club in Fontana, Calif.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Hells Angles continued to ride with the other 99 percent, but already their reputation roared out in front.

That reputation crashed into the public consciousness in 1954 when Marlon Brando starred in "The Wild One," a Hollywood sensation inspired by the rumble at Hollister.

That same year, the original Hells Angles chapter merged with San Francisco's Market Street Commandos to spawn the club's second chapter, whose president crafted the intimidating winged death's head that remains the Hells Angles calling card to this day.

Chapters quickly popped up along the California coastline, but there was no organization among the groups, no single vision. All that changed, however, when Ralph "Sonny" Barger helped establish the Oakland Chapter.

Although Barger insists he is not the leader of today's international Hells Angles, he is widely considered so by law enforcement, and undoubtedly wears an unofficial crown. Today, Barger lives in Arizona. George Christie, longtime president of the Ventura, Calif., chapter, is considered Barger's second-in-command and likely successor.

Under Barger's guidance, the Hells Angles chapters came together, hammering out bylaws, codes of conduct, patches, colors, tattoos and club houses. And the myth of the outlaw biker grew. There were tales of mayhem, violence, destruction and, in the early 1960s, accusations of rape in the oceanside town of Monterey.

That high-profile rape case, historians believe, marked the beginnings of what law enforcement now calls an international drug trafficking syndicate. In order to pay legal bills, the legend goes, the Hells Angles made a few drug deals, selling methamphetamines and entering for the first time the world of big-money narcotics.

Whether that version is true, few know for certain and none will admit - proof, perhaps, of the motto "three can keep a secret if two are dead." What is known is that the Hells Angles' defense, however financed, was successful and the rape suspects were acquitted.

It was the first in a long string of high-profile accusations, arrests and acquittals - suggesting either the Angles are slippery or that police like to arrest them despite flimsy evidence. Many believe the truth involves a bit of both.

Regardless, in winning the Monterey rape case the club also won over popular culture, which set the Hells Angles on a pedestal as icons of freedom and resistance to "the system."

The rape acquittals also caught the attention of the California attorney general, who began what would in just a few years become one of the longest running cat-and-mouse games ever played between law enforcement agencies and an established and easily identifiable group.

Infamy bred notoriety, and in the mid-1960s "The Nation" magazine sent a young Hunter S. Thompson off to write about the Hells Angles. Thompson returned to the bikers after completing the article, riding with the Hells Angles for a year while researching his book, "Hell's Angles: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang."

At the same time, Hollywood had discovered the bikers. Barger starred next to Jack Nicholson in "Hell's Angles on Wheels." Rock stars such as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead struck up friendships with the bikers, which Garcia admitted was a bit scary, because the Hells Angles were, as he put it, "good in all the violent spaces."

That was proved beyond doubt on Dec. 6, 1969, when the Hells Angles were hired as security for a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco.

That night, at the height of the Angles' bare-knuckled stardom, the crowd surged in waves and the Hells Angles braced against it. An irresistible force swept against an immovable object, Mick Jagger sang "Sympathy for the Devil" and everything came unhinged.

An 18-year-old Stones fan named Meredith Hunter rushed the stage, was beaten back, rushed again, was pushed back, pulled a gun, and shot a Hells Angel in the arm.

Barger, interviewed for a recent History Channel special, said that when Hunter fired, "people started stabbing him. The guy killed himself by pulling the gun and shooting it into a crowd. And to me, that's just part of everyday life in the Hells Angles - somebody shoots you, you stab him."

One Hells Angel was arrested for the killing, but later was acquitted, despite the fact that the entire incident was captured on film.

Now, with their bad-boy reputation squarely in place and undeniably earned, the Hells Angles began to emerge as a more sophisticated outfit.

They incorporated, trademarked the infamous death's head and opened chapters around the world.

Their boldness irritated law enforcement, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the government tried to pin an official organized crime designation on the group, attempting to prosecute the Hells Angles under laws originally designed to combat the Mafia. The alleged violations of racketeering, influence and corrupt organization laws, however, were never proved, with two hung juries unable to come to a decision on 38 of 44 separate charges.

The $15 million federal prosecution resulted in two mistrials, which prosecutors decried as a miscarriage of justice, while Barger threw a no-holds-barred bash for the jurors.

Despite the verdict exonerating the motorcycle club, police here and overseas continue to consider the Hells Angles a wealthy corporation with a global drug distribution network.

For their part, the Angles continue to deny all charges, and in 1998 happily celebrated their 50th anniversary. The Angles, who Christie admits are "not monks," nevertheless insist that if they were as bad as police allege, they would've been jailed and disbanded years ago.

Their argument goes something like this: with such easy prey (Hells Angles do, after all, advertise their affiliation with emblazoned colors) police must be incompetent investigators or simply working under mistaken assumptions, and they're willing to give police all credit due.

Or perhaps it is as Christie's club members say - cops chase Angles because Angles are easy to chase. Finding real criminals is much tougher, and would require investigative initiative beyond pulling over every biker wearing the infamous winged death's head.

Today, both sides agree much of what the Hells Angles were is as far gone as the origins of their name.

The war of rhetoric between the Angles and police has been spun by popular culture into a complicated web of conflicting myths. And as those myths have emerged, the Hells Angles have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, carried into tomorrow by sheer inertia, like a Harley riding high in the curve, barely holding on, relying on a wisp of friction to keep from blowing over the top and into quiet nothingness.

So far, friction has served them well.

Information for this article came from interviews with George Christie and members of the Ventura Hells Angles, conversations with law enforcement officers, the History Channel, and "Hell's Angles: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs," by Hunter S. Thompson.

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The air still smelled of wet paint and new carpet when the guest of honor arrived, smartly turned out in a black turtleneck, cream sport jacket, wire-frame glasses, and steel ankle shackles. Maurice "Mom" Boucher's grand entrance brought an abrupt hush over the newly built courtroom. For months, newspapers had described his condition as dire: Some said he was clinically depressed, a result of his isolation as the sole occupant of an entire wing of a women's prison in northern Montreal; others said he was malnourished because he was eating nothing but packaged potato chips for fear of being poisoned.

But at this preliminary hearing in Montreal, the 48-year-old leader of the Canadian Hells Angles appeared to be neither. Flashing a smile fit for a presidential candidate, he waved to his battery of lawyers and supporters before playfully hop-stepping into his seat in the bulletproof-glass box guards call the aquarium. Life in a fishbowl, after all, isn't so bad when you're the piranha.

Since 1994, Boucher and the Hells Angles have waged a brutal war with a rival biker gang called the Rock Machine for control of Quebec's billion-dollar drug trade, according to investigators. Considering how little attention the story has attracted outside Canada, the toll is staggering: 162 dead, scores wounded. The victims include an 11-year-old boy killed by shrapnel from one of the more than 80 bombs bikers have planted around the province. Even the New York Mafia in its heyday never produced such carnage, or so terrorized civilians.

"It's an embarrassment," says Helene Brunet, who was waiting tables in a diner last year when a Hells Angles biker used her as a human shield in a machine-gun battle that left her clinging to life over a plate of pancakes. "The police and the courts do nothing. They're incapable of stopping them."

Boucher has looked untouchable since his last tour through the criminal-justice system, on charges of ordering the executions of two prison guards in 1997. Just before his arraignment, at Montreal's Palais de Justice, a Pontiac Trans Am crashed through the plate-glass doors, scattering the crowd in the lobby like bowling pins. When the trial got under way, Hells Angles members reportedly paid spectators to give up their seats so that bikers could fill the first several rows and glare menacingly at the jury. One juror broke down in tears when the judge denied her request to be excused. Near the end of the trial, Boucher was so confident he'd get off that he leaked word that he'd be at Montreal's Molson Centre that Friday night for the middleweight boxing championship. Sure enough, the jury acquitted him; two hours later, he accepted an ovation from the stadium crowd before taking his ringside seat.

This time, the Quebec authorities are taking no chances. Last March, 2,000 police officers fanned out and arrested 125 Hells Angles and associates, capping the largest investigation in the country's history. Then, at a cost of $16.5 million, the province constructed a state-of-the-art courthouse especially for the Hells Angles trials. It sits right next to the jail where Boucher currently resides and is linked to it by a secured underground tunnel. A one-way mirror shields the jury from view.

Yet despite his maximum-security confinement, Boucher appears to have had a hand in rebuilding his gang and annexing new turf in the neighboring province of Ontario. This expansion has unleashed a new wave of violence and ratcheted up already dangerous tensions with rival biker clubs in the United States and abroad, police say. If they are right, then the bloodshed in Canada may be only a dress rehearsal for a coming world war.

Boucher made no formal statement during the two-hour hearing last October, but one gesture seemed to sum up his feelings about the government's latest attempt to put him out of business. During a break in the proceedings, he stood up, turned around, and stuck out his ass at the spectators. Even the Anglophones in this French-speaking courtroom needed no translation.

Canada's Hells Angles are the offspring of the infamous gang that came to prominence in Northern California in the fifties under Sonny Barger. Barger proudly referred to his troops as the "one-percenters"-a response to the American Motorcycle Association's claim that 99 percent of bikers were law-abiding citizens. But if an outlaw identity has been a constant for the Hells Angles, its methods and goals have changed since the early days. "It's no longer like the old Hollywood movie where the gang comes riding into town on their Harleys," says biker-gang expert Allan Jenson, a police investigator in Bellingham, Washington. "Today these clubs are purely a business venture." Currently, the Hells Angles claim about 2,200 full-fledged, dues-paying members in 194 chapters based in 27 countries.

According to law-enforcement officials, its actual strength is even greater than the numbers suggest because each member is allowed to run his own "puppet club," typically made up of younger bikers eager to prove their valor in return for a shot at full membership. "People don't realize how powerful that makes them," says Tim McKinley, an FBI agent who began investigating biker gangs in the eighties, when the bureau reclassified them as organized-crime groups. "Each of these guys has 9 to 30 criminal minions out there working for him all the time."

No one embodies the modern, corporate Hells Angel better than Mom Boucher, who is often described as the "John Gotti of the bikers." Like Gotti, Boucher cultivated a bourgeois image and distanced himself from the dirty work carried out by his underlings. Until his latest arrest, he lived in the Montreal suburb Contrecoeur in a quaint country-style house with his wife and his son, Francis. (At age 17, in 1992, Francis organized Quebec's first-ever neo-Nazi festival; he now stands accused of eight counts of murder in the same case as his father's.) Boucher spent most of his time in a nondescript office building from which he ran several legitimate businesses: real-estate investment, air-duct cleaning, and used-car sales.

"He looked like a regular guy, like a businessman," says a Montreal policeman who worked the beat. "He didn't even ride his bike very often." Instead, he was usually driven to his office in a Suburban-chauffeured at one point by a former Montreal cop. "You can't be fooled by the image," McKinley says. "The Hells Angles are very savvy today. They do things like Toys for Tots rides to counter their reputation, but they're into everything from drugs to extortion to money laundering. We put a lot of them away every year, but it's certainly a growth industry." 

	The man for whom the Quebec government built a special $16.5 million courthouse: Canadian Hells Angles leader "Mom"Boucher

If the Hells Angles' transition from random mayhem to more purposeful violence went unnoticed by most Americans, it may be because years of undisputed dominance in the United States made open warfare unnecessary. At first, the group enjoyed a similar preeminence among bikers north of the border. The Hells Angles set up its first Canadian chapter in 1977, in Montreal, during its first wave of international expansion. By 1985, it had added two more chapters in Quebec and taken over about 75 percent of the Montreal drug trade. "They had little resistance," says a Quebec police officer on the biker squad. "They quickly had their people set up in a lot of the bars in town."

At the time, Mom Boucher-a 28-year-old high-school dropout and son of a longshoreman-was making a name for himself on the streets of Montreal. He and his friend Salvatore Cazzetta were leaders of a small white-supremacist biker gang known as the SS. They were obvious Hells Angles candidates until a notorious incident known as the Lennoxville Massacre set them on separate paths. In March, 1985, the Hells chapter based in Lennoxville, about 90 miles east of Montreal, invited the members of the chapter from the town of Laval to a party. When the five Laval members arrived, they were ambushed and shot in the head; apparently their brethren suspected them of squandering drug profits by consuming too much of the product themselves. Two months later, divers found the decaying bodies wrapped in sleeping bags and tied to weightlifting plates at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River.

The Lennoxville Massacre was beyond the pale even for the criminal underworld, and it branded Quebec's Hells Angles as the most murderous bikers on the planet. Salvatore Cazzetta, for one, found Lennoxville an unforgivable breach of the outlaw code. Rather than joining the Hells, he formed his own, smaller gang, the Rock Machine, in 1986. "Sal once told me, 'Those guys, they operate their club in such a way that I didn't want to join them,'" says Fred Faucher, who soon joined Cazzetta's club himself. Unlike the Hells, Rock Machine members didn't identify themselves with colors or patches; each biker simply wore a gold ring with an eagle insignia.

Mom Boucher apparently did not share Cazzetta's concerns. Soon after finishing a 40-month sentence for armed sexual assault later that year, Boucher joined the Hells and quickly began to rise through the ranks. For several years, the Hells Angles and the Rock Machine co-existed peacefully. Law-enforcement officials believe this was due to Boucher's respect for the charismatic Cazzetta, who had connections to the Quebec Mafia, the only organized-crime group the bikers seemed unwilling to attack. In 1994, however, Cazzetta was arrested at a pit-bull farm for attempting to import eleven tons of cocaine. Boucher, who had recently moved up to president of the Montreal chapter of the Hells, began to put the clamps on the temporarily leaderless Rock Machine.

Guy Ouellette, a recently retired Quebec police investigator and biker expert, says the Hells sent their puppet clubs into bars controlled by the Rock Machine to persuade the owners and resident drug pushers to turn over their business. When they met with resistance, the bloodshed began. On July 14, 1994, two members of the Hells Angles' top puppet club, formed by Mom Boucher, walked into a motorcycle shop in downtown Montreal and gunned down a Rock Machine associate. "That was the beginning of the war," Ouellette says.

The following August, a remote-controlled bomb in a Jeep sliced a Rock Machine associate in half and sent shrapnel through the brain of 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, who was playing in a nearby schoolyard. The boy died four days later. A month after that, the first full Hells Angles member was shot and killed, while getting into his car at a shopping mall. "The day of his funeral, nine bombs went off around the province," Ouellette says. "It was chaos."

As the corpses of bikers and bystanders piled up, the authorities reacted with what they assumed would be overwhelming force. They formed the Wolverines, a multidisciplinary team of 60 of the province's top investigators dedicated to dismantling the biker gangs. It was the largest special law-enforcement unit created in Quebec since 1970, when the government was battling radical Quebecois separatists. But the Wolverines (and the Rock Machine) were facing an unusually resourceful opponent. During a four-month jail stint at around this time-on a minor charge of carrying a 9-mm handgun-Boucher used the telephone to help charter a new Hells chapter. Known as the Nomads, they were a sort of all-star dream team drawn from the best bikers in the region. Boucher was their leader. "The Nomads are known as the warriors of the Hells Angles," says Richard Bourdon of the Canadian national police. "They are the most powerful because they are not bound by any territory."

Boucher made his influence felt inside prison, too. During his term, he organized a prison-wide boycott of his least favorite meal, shepherd's pie. "I'd never seen anything like it," a prison official says. "He had the whole place in the palm of his hand." The Hells have a network of inmates called the Big House Brotherhood, which sells drugs-and keeps up the rivalry with other gangs. Less than a month after Boucher was released, bikers rioted at Quebec's main jail, the official says: "One of Boucher's top guys winked, and the next thing you know, about 60 guys started breaking down the place." The entire jail had to be put on lockdown for two months. From then on, every new prisoner had to declare an affiliation: Hells Angles in one wing; Rock Machine in another.

With approximately 60 members and associates in its two chapters (Montreal and Quebec City), the Rock Machine was about half the size of the Hells and had nowhere near as many support clubs. In 1997, with its founder, Cazzetta, still behind bars and the club described by police as "on its last gasp," the ambitious young Fred Faucher began a series of maneuvers that would ensure the survival of the Rock Machine in the near term-and, police say, place the leadership of the club in his hands by the end of the year.

Born in 1969 in Quebec City to a plumber and a housewife, Faucher dropped out of high school and briefly held a job installing sprinkler systems before joining the Rock Machine. Faucher is something of a traditionalist-he was one of the few bikers who still wore his hair long-but he was savvy enough to see that if the Rock Machine was to compete with the Hells it would have to adopt a corporate mind-set. "Like any other company needs to expand as much as it can, that's what we were trying to do," he says.

So Faucher went calling on a bigger, more established firm: the Bandidos, a Hells Angles-style motorcycle club formed in Texas in 1966. (Their motto: "We are the people our parents warned us about.") The Bandidos had recently embarked on a worldwide expansion campaign considered to be a direct challenge to the Hells Angles, and were now approaching them in numbers and global reach. From 1994 to 1997, the Hells Angles and the Bandidos had battled in Scandinavia, launching shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles at each other's clubhouses. Nearly two dozen people were killed before the gangs declared a cease-fire in September 1997.

The next month, George Wegers, the international vice president of the Bandidos, traveled to Canada to check out the Rock Machine. Faucher had invited him, hoping the visit would end with an offer for the Rock Machine to be "patched over" to, or made an official chapter of, the Bandidos. "The Hells Angles, which is a worldwide organization-and well-organized, by the way-will never sit down with such a small group of people as the Rock Machine," Faucher says. "So the main goal was to be a part of an international club so one of these days they will agree to sit down to talk with us"-about sharing territory and, presumably, profits. Faucher threw a lavish dinner party in Wegers's honor at the swanky Quebec City restaurant L'Astral, but it came to an abrupt end when police stormed in and arrested Faucher and 22 fellow Rock Machine members. (Only three were convicted, for possession of firearms.) Wegers was deported.

And the police weren't the only ones monitoring the Rock Machine. Minutes of a West Coast Hells Angles chapter meeting on November 22, 1997, read, "We have a video of the Bandito [sic] George [Wegers] with the Rock Machine in Canada." Investigators believe the Hells Angles took Wegers's visit to Canada-Hells territory-as a sign of bad faith, especially in light of the truce in Scandinavia. Faucher suddenly found himself caught in an international-relations nightmare.

"I had no idea there would be that much politicking," he says. "When the Hells Angles realized that the Bandidos were in contact with the Rock Machine, they called meetings [with the Bandidos]. They said, 'Don't take in our enemies.' I don't know if it was a threat, but they were not happy about it. The Bandidos said, 'No, we're just partying with those guys. We're not going to patch them right away.' It was like politics, big time." 

The conflict had other political consequences as well, as civilian casualties of the biker wars began to organize. In March 1997, police say, Fred Faucher had packed a truck with more than 100 pounds of dynamite and crashed it through the gates of the Hells Angles' clubhouse in Quebec City, barely escaping before the remote-control mechanism went off. The explosion rocked the residential neighborhood, tossing people from their beds, knocking doors off their hinges, and blowing the windows out of 22 buildings. Nine days later, 2,000 citizens marched on city hall to demand better police protection. Whether it was the fault of Canada's criminal-sentencing guidelines or infighting among the ranks of the Wolverines, the government's failure to end the violence vaulted into the national spotlight. Within weeks, the Canadian legislature passed a tough new bill giving police broader powers to investigate organized crime. As soon as it went into effect, Faucher, Boucher, and nearly all their followers were wiretapped and watched around the clock. Both leaders were believed to communicate with associates using chalk and blackboards.

To most observers, though, Mom Boucher appeared to take the crackdown as a personal challenge. In June and September of 1997, two off-duty prison guards were murdered in drive-by shootings. One of the gunmen would later testify that Boucher ordered the killings to send a message to would-be prison informers. (He also recalled being summoned to Boucher's house and sent up in a helicopter to patrol for rival gang members.) Boucher spent most of the following year behind bars, but the jury evidently didn't believe the gunman-the only witness, an ex-con-and Boucher was acquitted. From then on, he made a point of flaunting his apparent impunity (even while he, like Faucher, rarely left home without a bulletproof vest). He worked out daily at a gym across the street from a police precinct house. Two or three times a week, he held meetings at a food court in the building that housed the cops' investigative unit. Sometimes he even took snapshots of the detectives, with whom he was by then well-acquainted.

The violence grew more brazen, too. On September 13, 2000, veteran crime reporter Michel Auger was shot six times in the back on his way to his newspaper, Le Journal de Montreal. The day before, he had published an investigation of the bikers on the front page. Auger managed to survive-his doctors called it a miracle-but the attempted assassination of one of the country's best-known journalists ignited public outrage. In Ottawa, the nation's capital, Parliament held emergency hearings-in secret and under heavy guard, as some legislators had received death threats. (Police would later learn of a Hells Angles hit list targeting police officers, journalists, and high-ranking members of the provincial government.) "It's terror that reigns," said Gilles Duceppe, then the head of Canada's largest opposition party, before receiving death threats himself. "We don't want Colombia reproduced in Quebec."

	The end of the road for former Rock Machine leader Fred Faucher, who was convicted of seven bombings.

Even Canada's criminal population began to take umbrage. Police say several underworld figures in Montreal sent word to Boucher to cool things down before the laws became so strict that none of them would be able to function. "There was huge pressure from the Italians, and even the Asian and Colombian gangs, for a truce," says a source at the Canadian intelligence agency. Finally, Fred Faucher would get his meeting with the Hells.

On October 8, 2000, Mom Boucher sat down with Faucher at the Bleu Marin. A photographer from the weekly crime tabloid Allo Police was invited to take pictures as the rival leaders smiled and shook hands. After the cameraman was shooed away, Boucher made an unexpected offer: He invited the Rock Machine to join the Hells Angles. "Their idea was if we sit all together, we can have something that will last forever," Faucher says. "'We have so many involved,' they said, 'so many people around us, so many support clubs.' All that would be ours."

For the Rock Machine, joining the Hells Angles seemed like an odd move-if not, in light of the Lennoxville Massacre, altogether naïve. Faucher, however, says he took the offer back to his troops. "We agreed that we'd stay together [as the Rock Machine] for another year, and get to know each other for a while and settle down the dust," he says.

Of course, that didn't happen. Two days after the meeting, Boucher was arrested again; the government had won the right to retry him for the murders of the two prison guards. Soon he would be charged with thirteen more murders and a host of other crimes in a case police had been developing for months with the help of an informant. Danny Kane, a 31-year-old contract killer for the Hells Angles, was living a double life in almost every way. At home, he was a husband and father of four. Away from home, he was the gay lover of a Hells Angles associate, a convicted killer whom he had met through a personal ad. And at work, as the driver and bodyguard for one of Boucher's top associates, he was secretly recording conversations and copying computer disks that police say documented a $1 billion-a-year cocaine empire headed by Boucher's Nomads. A few weeks after turning over his evidence, which police hope will deal a lethal blow to the Hells Angles, Kane was found dead in his garage of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

With Boucher locked up, the Rock Machine saw an opportunity. Five members-Faucher was not among them-flew to Germany and finally secured an official invitation to join the Bandidos. Police say the Rock Machine voted to accept the offer at a meeting on November 29, 2000, a move that is hard to interpret as anything but a battle cry. Faucher is adamant that the decision came after his last arrest, on December 6. "What we agreed on before I got locked in, I stood up to that," Faucher says. "You can tell Mom."

Either way, the Bandidos' arrival in Canada has triggered a worldwide expansion drive by both Hells Angles and Bandidos. Law-enforcement experts in the United States, including the FBI, say the actions resemble a military preparation. "There's friction in Germany, there's friction in New Mexico, there's friction in Colorado," says Patrick Schneider, a U.S. attorney based in Phoenix and the president of the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association. "For the first time, you have the Hells Angles' world dominance being seriously challenged. One of two things has to happen: Either they work out an uneasy truce, divide up the territory and co-exist, or I can't see that there's going to be anything short of a bloodbath worldwide."

Today, Fred Faucher is serving twelve years in a Quebec City prison on 29 charges, including seven attempted bombings. Although his own life seems to be turning around-he has cut ties with his old gang and is taking courses toward a high-school diploma-he isn't optimistic about the biker war. "What I hope will happen and what I think will happen are two different things," he says. "But I'm not involved anymore. And if I was a kid of 21 today, for sure I wouldn't join. Back then, the biker lifestyle was different. It was, more than anything, shoot the shit, ride motorcycles, and party. It wasn't either you get killed or you get locked up, which is pretty much what it is today."

Mom Boucher goes on trial this month on two of the fifteen murder charges he faces. He hasn't spoken to the media since April 2000, when he attended the funeral of Normand Hamel, a fellow Nomad and one of his closest friends. Hamel was assassinated while taking his daughter to the pediatrician, a killing Boucher explained by saying, "It's a ball game and he was part of the same ball game as me." And Boucher looks determined to remain in the game, despite his solitary confinement, the 24-hour video surveillance, and the reports of ill health. On December 29, 2000, six weeks after his latest arrest, the Hells Angles threw a party at their heavily fortified clubhouse in Sorel, 40 miles northeast of Montreal. The occasion: a massive patch-over of 160 bikers from four independent gangs from Ontario. Home to Canada's largest city, Toronto, Ontario is probably the most lucrative drug market in the country. It is also the site of three new Bandidos chapters. The war has a new front.

Detective Guy Ouellette, who was patrolling the area outside the party that night, was summoned to the porch by a biker holding a cell phone. When Ouellette put the phone to his ear, he heard a familiar voice. It was Mom Boucher, calling from prison. Bonne Année, Boucher said. Happy New Year.