Canada tries to rein in biker gang

From a distance, it looks much like any other warehouse situated within this industrial patch of Toronto. But its gothic sign and menacing sculpture of a winged skeleton head at the doorway are an emphatic proclamation: The Hell's Angels have arrived.

It's a dramatic evolution for Canada's most notorious outlaws. The biker gang, which once confined its criminal activities to a small part of the country, is morphing into a national force. Now, as Hell's Angels pockets spring up in Toronto, Winnipeg, and beyond, law-enforcement officials are trying to put the lid on things before the bloody biker wars of Quebec spill over into the rest of Canada.

"The bullets have started to fly across the country," says veteran biker investigator Guy Ouellette, now retired from the Quebec police force, who followed the gang's activities for more than a decade. "These guys are greedy. They're looking for a bigger piece of the pie. And they now want their flag in every province."

Members of the biker group deny that they promote violence - or that they are staging a turf war across the country. Many say they simply enjoy membership in the organization and do not circumvent the law.

But over the past decade, members of the Hell's Angels were locked in a violent turf war in Quebec with a rival biker group - the Rock Machine - for control of Quebec's billion-dollar drug trade. The death toll in the conflict, which has died down, has been staggering; 162 dead since 1994, including an 11-year-old boy who was hit by shrapnel. A local journalist was also gunned down in 2000 for an exposé he wrote on the group.

The death figures far outnumber those in the United States, according to the experts, largely because of the unparalleled gang wars of the past decade.

With a number of high-profile prosecutions under way in Quebec - on the heels of the conviction of Hell's Angels leader Maurice "Mom" Boucher last year - the gang has set its sights on national expansion.

More than a quarter of the world's 2,200 Hell's Angels members live in Canada, where they have 34 chapters. Their Canadian presence is eclipsed in terms of worldwide membership only by the US's 60 chapters.

While the gang's Canadian tentacles now stretch from the waterfront in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the western ports of Vancouver, its most rapid growth has been in Ontario. The richest and most populous province in Canada, Ontario had no members three years ago, but is now home to 40 percent of the gang's Canadian membership, or 270 bikers.

Julian Sher, coauthor of a new book on biker gangs, says poor police work and infighting, combined with a weak justice system, have contributed to the unfettered violence and growth of the organization.

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