Watch yer Fritos
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The Bandidos are coming
by ROBBIE DILLON
With the Habs sucking harder than a $12 hooker and the soon-to-be EX-pos headed for the U.$.A., keeping score in the ongoing biker war is quickly becoming the hottest game in town. For those of you who've somehow missed all the fun, the Hells Angels and their Rock Machine counterparts have spent the last six years playing shoot-'em-up in a vicious struggle for control of the city's cash-a-licious illegal drug trade.
The past few months have been particularly dismal for the home team, as it were. A series of assassinations and defections left the forces of the Rock Machine--who've supplied most of the bodies for the war's 150-plus count--in disarray. It was widely expected that the handful of members who hadn't been blown up, locked down or flipped by the cops would be assimilated by the Angels.
But then, just when it looked like all the fireworks were over, the remnants of the Rock Machine took advantage of a late-October truce to merge what was left of their five Quebec and Ontario chapters into the Texas-based Bandidos, the second-largest biker gang in the world. Needless to say, the Angels were not impressed.
"Nobody's going to talk about it," said an anonymous underworld source with ties to the bikers. "But obviously, the Hells aren't happy. They thought they had the whole thing locked up tight. But this Bandidos deal is like a whole new can of worms."
While the Rock Machine was a strictly local, ad hoc alliance formed in reaction to the Angels' strong-arm tactics, the Bandidos are an international brotherhood with well-established chapters in Europe, North America and Australia. Like the Angels, the Bandidos are a structured corporate entity with gaggles of squawking lawyers, a PR firm, and e-commerce Web sites that sell officially licensed merchandise to their supporters.
The Bandidos are also long-time rivals of the Hells Angels. In Denmark, the two groups recently ended a three-year feud that featured daylight attacks with shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. The leaders of the gangs purchased time on a local TV station to announce the details of the truce.
According to police, it's too early to say what the effect of the Bandidos entry into the fray will mean. But just before New Year's, the Hells Angels held a mass initiation and patched over members of several Ontario gangs, including the Satan's Choice and Para Dice Riders. Police say the unusual recruitment drive and moves to establish official chapters in the province are the Angels' response to the Bandidos' recent arrival in the region.
Wars are bad for business, as any street-corner dealer or neo-con economist can tell you--C-4 don't come cheap, ya know. But the potential profits of a province-wide dope-opoly may be just too juicy to resist.
"[The Angels and Bandidos] will probably just sit down and carve [the territory] up between them," said the underworld source. "But if they can't manage to work things out, it'll make what's happened so far look like a pillow fight."
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