Mention the Hells Angels to most people and up pops an image of big-bellied, leather-vested, tattooed hellions brawling their way from bar to bar on blisteringly loud Harley-Davidson hawgs. Mention the Angels to Corporal John Furac of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and he thinks "highly sophisticated organized crime network."
Furac, who heads one of British Columbia's drug-busting "green teams," is convinced the Angels are behind 70 percent of the estimated $2 billion to $4 billion worth of high-grade marijuana grown in British Columbia every year. Police say three-quarters of that is exported to the states. "And there is so much we haven't investigated yet," Furac says. "Could the numbers be higher? Yes, they could." He likens the Angels' operations to those of the old-style Mafia: "They're not necessarily going to have their hands in it, but you need their approval to grow, and they get a cut."
To show what he means, Furac offers to play guide on a crime tour of Langley and Surrey, two lush Vancouver suburbs known for their high-quality bud. He jams a magazine into his handgun, hops into the front seat of his team's unmarked Bronco, and whisks us out of the RCMP parking lot, voices jabbering on the police radio between the front seats. We head down long, winding road after long, winding road, past at least 12 current or past "grow ops," police slang for marijuana growing operations. Furac says there are a few thousand in BC; others put the number as high as 25,000.
Furac points to a barn that, when busted a year ago, was packed to the rafters with plants more than 6 and a half feet tall. We pass cement warehouses, hydroponic growing supply shops, and regular-looking homes with blocked-off windows (including one former grow house that, Furac says, was right across the street from the RCMP station). We even pull up to a split-level he says is stocked with pot now. "The plants are in the double garage in back of the house," he explains as we peer through the bushes. So when are you going to bust it? I ask. "It's on the list," he says. "Right now my people are on holiday. It's bad timing."
Finally we head for the nest, what Furac considers the drug world's local control center: the Hells Angels clubhouse. Down a quaint country road, just beyond the Hometown Hay & Feed, we creep past a building that looks to have once been a corner store; it's still got a sign above the door that reads "Harrington Grocery, Free Delivery." But now the building is painted white with red trim and, according to Furac, serves as a "booze can," an after-hours drinking joint, for the Angels. Red and white, the club's colors, are displayed on the backs of leather jackets everywhere. "If you see a red car with a white roof, that probably means they are a Hells Angel in this part of the country," explains Furac. There are flower boxes on the porch and some chairs. The curtains in the front windows are drawn and it doesn't look like anybody's inside. But as we get near, Furac reaches over and flips the passenger-side visor down to hide my face from the camera he says is mounted on the front porch.
Just beyond the booze can, we come to the clubhouse. It looks like your basic farmhouse except that, again, it's painted red and white and surrounded by a fence with a gate announcing the chapter's name: Hells Angels' White Rock Chapter. How do the Angels get away with being so bold? The question can be answered in two ways, depending on whom you ask. The RCMP claims the Angels are uncowed because the police are too understaffed and underfunded to be much threat to such a closed and canny organization. The Angels, on the other hand, say they have nothing to hide—they're just a worldwide network of motorcycle enthusiasts. Sure, members get involved in a crime or two, leaders have said in the past, but that hardly makes their club a criminal organization.
Furac points to homes on all sides of the Angels clubhouse and explains how the public doesn't take the Angels as a serious threat. He complains that the average Joe romanticizes them—the women, the open road—as the last free-wheelers in a society of conformists. And their neighbors love them: "Do you know that when they have parties, they pay for their neighbors to go away for the weekend? They pay for their holidays." Furac goes on and on, clearly frustrated at his department's ineffectuality. He talks about bugging the Angels in small ways, as with traffic violations. "I used to go out and park in front of the clubhouse and pretend to take pictures with a camera that didn't have any film in it," he snickers. "They'd throw rocks at me and threaten to take pictures of me."
Boys just want to have fun
The Hells Angels motorcycle club was born in the late 1940s, after WWII veterans returned home and found themselves bored silly with civilian life. Longing for the action and camaraderie of the battlefield, a small crew out of San Bernardino County, California, picked up surplus military motorcycles and began touring together. They made their public debut at a now-famous three-day biker rally in Hollister, California, sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association, which had no idea what the town was in for. According to the 1987 book Hells Angels: Taking Care of Business by journalist Yves Lavigne, more than 4,000 motorcycles tore into sleepy Hollister that weekend, brawling, drinking, and drag racing for days until the local police finally called in reinforcements from the highway patrol. Nearly 100 bikers were jailed, and 50 people injured.
