But for all the power and versatility of the Internet and the speed and flexibility of credit- and debit-card payments, one fast-growing area of crime revolves around nothing more sophisticated than the humble cheque book.
Although cheque use is falling each year – we wrote 2.8 billion cheques in 1999 and the figure is expected to drop to 1.7 billion by 2009 – the amount of money lost to cheque fraud is rising dramatically. Intercepted in the post or stolen during house burglaries, cheques with crudely forged signatures are used to pay for millions of pounds’ worth of goods each year and no amount of technology seems able to defeat the problem. In 2002, losses from cheque fraud involving forged signatures increased by a third to £23 million.
All of which goes to show that, no matter how sophisticated and computer-savvy society becomes, some criminals will always prefer the low-tech approach.
BIKERS
CHAPTER TWELVE
If it had been any other Stephen Cunningham, there would have been little cause for concern. By the end of the second week of September 1997 the family of the forty-six-year-old civil engineer from Swindon had not heard from him in almost five days. After contacting a few of his friends and confirming that they, too, had heard nothing, his daughter decided to file an official missing-persons report at her local police station. On average, around four thousand such reports are made each week, and middle-aged men are one of the groups most likely to disappear – a way of temporarily escaping concerns about careers, debts and growing old. The vast majority simply return of their own accord, but from the start this case was different.
This particular Stephen Cunningham was a man better known to the police as ‘Grumps’, a leading member of the Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Cunningham had achieved a dubious level of notoriety in April 1991 when he travelled to Southampton and attempted to plant a bomb under a car belonging to a member of a rival biker gang. As Cunningham moved the device into place it detonated early, tearing off his right hand.
The car-bomb attack came in the midst of a fierce battle between the Nomads and the Southampton chapter of the Satan’s Slaves. The fighting had begun a few months earlier when Nomads chapter president Stephen Harris, a motorcycle salesman, and fellow member Barry Burn, a mechanic, were shot at during a trip to Bristol. Harris was hit in the arm but Burn escaped without injury. A few months later another member of the gang, David McKenzie, was stabbed eight times in an attack outside a Gloucester pub. Rescued by fellow Nomads, McKenzie was taken to the grounds of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and stripped of his ‘colours’ – the patches that identified him as a Hells Angel – before being taken in for treatment. Within a few days McKenzie had discharged himself.
With no sign of Cunningham the fear was that the war between the two gangs had claimed its first life. ‘Both the police and his family have grave concerns for him,’ Detective Sergeant Jerry Butcher said at the time. ‘It is rare for him to go for more than a couple of days without making some form of contact. It means you have to consider that he may have come to some harm.’
His daughter, Michelle, seemed to accept this. ‘Whatever may have happened, my family needs to put it to rest,’ she told the Swindon Evening Advertiser. ‘Not knowing anything is worse; we are in a state of limbo. Even if it is just to confirm our worst fears, we would like to know.’
But the more the police probed, the more the mystery deepened. Their inquiries showed that Cunningham had left his Swindon home early on 9 September, driven to Ramsgate in Kent and boarded the four p.m. Sally Lines ferry to Ostend as a foot passenger. Video footage showed him arriving in Belgium at around six p.m. UK time, and records show that he used his mobile phone an hour and a half later to get it switched to a network that would allow him to make calls across Europe. Although Cunningham had booked a return passage on the ferry for 11 September, he never used it.
In accordance with the rules and regulations of the Hells Angels, the other members of the Nomads chapter refused to give the police any assistance, not making so much as a single statement. The message was loud and clear: whatever reason Cunningham had to travel abroad, whatever he planned to do while he was there and whatever trouble he had got himself into, it had absolutely nothing to do with the club.
According to its one-time spokesman, the late Ian ‘Maz’ Harris, Ph.D: ‘The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is a loosely based organisation of motorcycle enthusiasts who own bikes of 750cc or more. We are primarily and exclusively a motorcycle club. That is all.’
The Memorandum of Association for Hells Angels Limited, registered at Companies House in October 1976, adds the following objectives: ‘To foster, encourage and advance the sport and recreation of motor-cycling and to promote the acceptance of the ethical code of morality of the Hells Angels club; to encourage, promote and hold race meetings, happenings, rallies, reliability trials, exhibitions and shows and give entertainments of all kinds related to motor-cycling.’
Indeed, every year the club’s 250-odd members, along with hundreds more associates, attend a number of exclusive rallies and conventions, stage huge, highly profitable shows where customised bikes are displayed, and donate thousands of pounds to various charities. In June 2002 it was a Hells Angel, Alan ‘Snob’ Fisher, who led a cavalcade of fellow bikers in a Jubilee procession past the Queen, raising money for the anti-child bullying charity Kidscape in the process.
However, according to the police, the Hells Angels are a major international criminal organisation, a ‘pure form of organised crime’, who ‘have accomplished in twenty-five years what it took the Mafia over two hundred years to do’. Interpol describes outlaw motorcycle gangs as ‘one of Europe’s faster-growing criminal networks’ and closely monitors their activities. Not surprisingly, the bikers disagree: they insist that the police are simply paranoid and that, because they live an alternative lifestyle yet remain highly visible, they are the ideal soft target.
‘We’re so prominent it’s untrue,’ Dr Harris told me. ‘We ride about on big bikes and wear patches on our backs to say who we are and where we’re from. I mean, if you’re hell bent on collective criminality, it’s hardly the way to go about it. We’d have all been arrested years ago. We’re not trying to claim that we’re all perfect. Nobody ever is, but to suggest that we represent a significant threat to the peace and prosperity of Britain is taking things too far.’
So when, as happens periodically, an Angel is arrested, charged and convicted of crimes ranging from murder and mortgage fraud to drug-dealing and assault, the usual excuse is that their ranks might contain a few bad apples but that doesn’t make them a new Mafia. ‘The club,’ said Harris, ‘cannot be held responsible for the actions of individual members.’
There are many things the Hells Angels don’t like to talk about. The exact meaning of the many patches and badges that they wear comes near the top of the list. One Hells Angels website features a handy code of conduct for members of the public wishing to fraternise with members: ‘Don’t ask what a patch or insignia means on any Motorcycle Club member’s vest. It’s club business! It’s okay if you’re talking to a club member to ask/say, ‘That’s a great-looking pin, is it ivory?’, but not ‘What does that stand for? It’s not that it’s anything mystic or cryptic, it’s just that it’s for members, and members only, to know.’
As soon as he had recovered from the injuries sustained in the car-bombing, Cunningham was back on the Angels social circuit, attending rallies, parties and runs, and generally living the hedonistic biker life. Almost immediately the denim cut-off and leather jacket that bore his colours featured a new patch: two Nazi-style SS lightning bolts below the words ‘Filthy Few’. According to the biography of legendary Hells Angel Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, president of the Oakland chapter, the Filthy Few patch is a piece of harmless fun. ‘It means that someone is the first to arrive at a party and the last to leave,’ he says. In reality the patch is only awarded to Angels who have murdered on behalf of the club – usually in the
presence of another member for corroboration – or who are prepared to commit a murder at a moment’s notice. Despite failing to complete the task he had been assigned, Cunningham’s willingness to plant the bomb had been judged sufficient to enable him to join the Filthy Few.
Such a reward was necessary for Cunningham because activities of this kind are not undertaken lightly. When the Angels go to war with rival gangs (and occasionally among themselves) outsiders can be forgiven for thinking it revolves around nothing more than club pride and maintaining the hedonistic fighting and drinking traditions of the biker lifestyle.
The truth is that the primary reasons the Angels do battle is to protect their business interests. And these days, almost exclusively, that means the drugs trade. Across the world biker gangs are involved in drug-dealing and trafficking on a massive scale. Estimates from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms suggest the Angels and the other biker gangs collectively earn up to £1 billion a year from the drugs business.
‘The Hells Angels particularly are very involved in the drug-dealing scene in the UK,’ says a spokesman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service. ‘Traditionally their commodities were cannabis and amphetamine, but they are moving more and more into Class A drugs.’
Stephen Cunningham was a major amphetamine and cannabis dealer and the man whose car he attempted to blow up was not just the member of a rival biker gang but also the head of a rival drugs outfit that had been attempting to flood Cunningham’s turf with cheap supplies of cannabis, amphetamine and cocaine.
Virtually every fight, every shooting, every stabbing and every bombing that has taken place between biker gangs in the UK and further afield in the past twenty-five years is ultimately connected to a desire to protect the highly lucrative drugs business from which the gangs derive the vast majority of their income. Although they are also involved in several other areas – prostitution, theft and extortion among them – drugs are considered the core business.
The Angels in particular are super-cautious, rarely carrying the product themselves, preferring to bury it then tell customers where to find it. One amphetamine dealer supplied by the Angels complained to police how they regularly drove him half mad with his weekly delivery. When he had deposited the money earlier in the day at a ‘safe’ drop site, they would call him in the early hours of the following morning and simply tell him, ‘It’s in your garden.’ The dealer’s neighbours reported how he could regularly be seen in his underpants at four a.m., armed with a torch and a spade, searching frantically for the goods.
One police surveillance team followed a pair of Angels (who were not wearing their colours so as not to attract attention) to a local park and watched as they sat about for around two hours feeding the ducks and exchanging pleasantries with passers-by before leaving. It was only later that it emerged the two had been supervising the pick-up of a kilo of amphetamine. The drugs had been concealed in a rubbish bin earlier in the day and the Angels were there to ensure that no one but their customer picked it up.
Failure to stick to protocol leaves the bikers open to prosecution as was the case when a Thames Valley Angel was stopped on his bike during a routine check. He was found to have a half an ounce of amphetamine sulphate inside his glove, and later privately admitted that the only reason he had been caught was because a sale had been cancelled; rather than taking the product to the stash site, which would have involved a longer journey, he decided to risk keeping it with him.
But even when caught red-handed, many Angels are bolshie enough to beat the rap. When one senior member was stopped in his car soon after leaving a rally and found to have a bag containing nine kilos of high-quality cannabis resin beside him, he didn’t hesitate to tell the police officers the truth. ‘What a coincidence,’ he told them. ‘I was just on my way to the police station to hand this in. I found it at the rally. I think it might be drugs.’ The Angel’s fingerprints were found on the outside of the bag but not on the packets of drugs inside. It meant it was impossible to disprove his story – no matter how unlikely – and the charges were dropped.
It was a similar story when another Angel was stopped and found to have half a kilo of cocaine and a loaded handgun hidden behind a door panel of the vehicle. ‘You’ve got me bang to rights,’ he told the officers. ‘I stole the car.’
Indeed, the vehicle was not registered to him or anyone else within the gang (though it wasn’t until some hours later that the registered owner reported it stolen). With no fingerprint evidence, even the owner could not be charged with possession. All those connected to the vehicle were acquitted of all charges.
The Angels and the other biker gangs involved in the drugs trade protect themselves from police ‘buy and bust’ operations by restricting themselves to selling to those on a list of ‘approved’ customers. Particular deals are co-ordinated and run by individual bikers using a few associates, mostly prospects or hang-arounds (the two ranks below full membership of the club) to do the legwork. That way, even if they’re caught, the club is unlikely to be implicated.
For this reason prosecutions involving large numbers of bikers or attempts to prove the club as a whole is involved in a conspiracy are rare, but the case against the St Austell-based Scorpio gang, jailed in the mid-1980s, shows the level of sophistication the trafficking can reach. The Scorpio had earned themselves more than £1 million by cornering the market for cannabis, amphetamines and LSD in the West Country, and Plymouth in particular, by using strong-arm tactics to drive other suppliers out of business.
Under the guidance of president Mark ‘Snoopy’ Dyce, gang associates purchased large quantities of amphetamine powder and cannabis resin in Amsterdam, paying for them using Thomas Cook money orders. Packets of drugs were then concealed in false compartments of specially adapted Ford cars and driven through Customs. Then, from a safe house in Rainham, Essex (deliberately far away from the gang’s home turf), the drugs were wrapped in brown paper, labelled ‘motorcycle parts’ and sent to customers around the country using British Rail’s Red Star parcel-delivery service. Ever conscious of police surveillance, drug deals were never spoken about but negotiated on paper. Like the Angels, they kept many of their drug supplies hidden away. Amphetamine worth £20,000 belonging to the gang was found buried in Southway Woods.
The Scorpio gang were relatively small and isolated so had to run every aspect of the smuggling operation themselves, but the Angels and the larger clubs are able to take full advantage of the fact that they have representatives in countries around the world to help ease the passage of narcotics from one border to another.
In 1994 detectives swooped on London’s Hilton Hotel and arrested two Canadian Angels, Pierre Rodrigue and David Rouleau, who had travelled to London to supervise a planned shipment of more than a tonne of cocaine. Rouleau in particular, clean-cut and fresh-faced, looked far more like a city stockbroker or accountant than a member of a biker gang and typifies the way the Angels have adjusted their image to blend into the background rather than stand out from the crowd.
It was for this reason that Cunningham was freshly scrubbed and wearing a smart business suit the day he boarded the ferry to Ostend and vanished from the face of the earth. His final destination was Amsterdam where he was due to meet with Dutch Angels to pay for a consignment of cannabis that would be shipped to Britain later. There were also discussions to be had about future drugs deals and deliveries of ecstasy to enable the Angels to move into the club drugs market.
The Angels already control much of the cocaine, amphetamine and ecstasy trade in the Netherlands. They work closely with the Kampers – the Dutch gypsy community – who in turn are closely connected to members of the Colombian Cali cocaine cartel, and Cunningham is believed to have been promised an introduction.
‘That part of the trip went smoothly,’ one source close to the Nomads told me, ‘but the problems began when he started heading back. Grumps had always been a popular member of the club, but a few months before he vani
shed, he had a big falling-out with some of the other Nomads. They unanimously voted to get rid of him and when the Angels do that, they mean something more than just kicking you out of the club.
‘He had been involved at the highest levels and knew all their secrets and that meant he was a liability. When they decided to take him out, they knew it had to be done on a permanent basis. Members of the Dutch Angels agreed to do the job. They say Grumps is at the bottom of some canal now. I don’t think his body is ever going to be found.’
The legend that was to become the Hells Angels was born on 17 March 1948 when Second World War veteran Otto Friedli formed a new bike gang out of the remnants of two notorious fighting and drinking clubs.
Dozens of loose-knit biker groups, with names like the Booze Fighters and the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington, had sprung up across America in the mid-1940s. Motorcycles were cheap – many were sold off as military surplus – and appealed in particular to the hundreds of former soldiers and airmen who found it hard to cope with uneventful lives following the end of the war. They came together at weekends, riding hard and drinking even harder. For those who had nowhere to go when Monday came, the club turned into a surrogate family.
In 1947 at an American Motorcycle Association drag-racing meeting in the quiet town of Hollister, California, the Pissed Off Bastards rode in drunk and created absolute mayhem, fighting anyone and everyone and ripping the place to shreds. 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 one per cent of motorcyclists should ruin it for the law-abiding 99 per cent. To this day, outlaw biker gangs wear the ‘1%’ badge with pride.
Gangs Page 19