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[jenov4]

I was watching Paula Zahn on CNN last night and they had this really interesting segment about this agent Billy Queen who went undercover infiltrating the Mongols Biker Gang. Apparently they're the most violent biker gang in history.

Article Here: http://news-record.com/news/local/queen_040605.htm

Some Quotes:

But some of the Mongols remained suspicious, especially “Red Dog,” the gang’s obnoxious, crank-crazed, full-body-tattooed national sergeant-at-arms. Red Dog’s suspicion boiled over into dislike, and he made life miserable for Queen. As a prospect, Queen was required to take everything the Mongols dished out. That included Red Dog’s vicious blows to the stomach.

Queen was certain Red Dog, and other Mongols, were about to kill him one day at their makeshift firing range deep in an orange grove. “Red Dog began screaming at me, 'How long was your (police) academy, Billy? How long was your ------- academy?’ and I knew they had made me. When he ordered me to turn around and go put up some targets, I thought they were going to shoot me in the head. I thought I’d never see my kids again.”

I might just have to pick up this book now!

 

[Doth Togo]

this does sound like a good read. i'll check it out.

 

[jenov4]

Here's another quote, after the busts of the gang:

He slipped away from the Mongols one spring day in 2000 as hundreds of federal and state agents began arresting Mongols and seizing dozens of illegal guns, cocaine and stolen motorcycles.

Queen didn’t see his former Mongol buddies again until months later, when he testified against them in court. They looked at him, not with hatred, but with hurt, he said.

Damn!!

 

[The_Sorrow]

I swear this on anything I was driving on the 605 freeway and I was two guys who speed right past me in there Harley bikes wearing Mongol leather jackets. Both were white of course and one had a long ass beard while the other looked like your average 50-60 year old guy.

Really weird because I thought they were nothing compared to the Hells Angels.

 

[speedpop]

Nice article.

 

[The_Sorrow]

When I saw these guys leather jackets though, I thought they were just some losers who only had there bikes and were roaming the vast state of California. Of course I knew they were probably involved in illegal activity but nothing close to being a huge gang involved in smuggling drugs etc. I thought they were your average biker gang who got involed in bar fights etc. Real trippy stuff.

 

[jenov4]

Oh yeah, I was doing a little bit more reading and this Mongol's gang had driven out the Hell's Angel from Califorina after a 17 year battle. Even Hell's Angel members are afraid of these guys:

Queen’s relationship with the Mongols evolved into a strange kind of camaraderie. He found that he actually liked spending his spare time with them rather than with his ATF colleagues. He grins with pride even today when he talks about how the Mongols could frighten the hated Hells Angels into submission by merely staring them down.

 

[PartlyCloudlike]

Here's an old article about the conflict between the Hells Angels and nearly every other bike gang.

http://www.maximonline.com/grit/articles/article_4768.html

Hell on Wheels

The Mob’s gone. Now outlaw biker gangs are battling for global crime turf with AK-47s and antitank rockets, and the death toll’s rising fast. It’s the Hells Angels versus everyone in the deadliest gang war the world’s ever seen.

Maxim, September 2002

By Lamont James

LAUGHLIN, NEVADA April 27, 2002; 2:10 a.m.
In the stark desert lowlands of southern Nevada, the town of Laughlin sticks up out of the desert like a poor man’s Reno—a long-ass drive from anywhere, one two-mile-long paved block of cheese that runs along the Colorado River. It’s the fourth day of the 20th annual River Run, and the town’s 12,000 hotel rooms are packed with bikers from all over the Southwest. Most are weekend warriors—guys who polish up their Harleys once a year, leather babes who’ll flash their tits at anyone who can whistle. Even in the early morning hours, 80,000 chrome cowboys are sucking the town’s liquor well dry.

Headed south down the strip, 35 Hells Angels are cruising in a tight pack. The curdling rev of beefed-up V-twin Hog engines echoes off the casinos lining the road. Rolling thunder, as they say. At the end of town, the pack hangs a left into the valet parking lot of Harrah’s Casino. Clad in jeans, boots, and leather vests sporting the Hells Angels colors, the bikers park by the door. Most leave their keys in the ignitions.

They don’t plan on staying long.

Raising nervous eyes from the blackjack tables, the Angels shuffle in and fill the hotel lobby. Security intercepts them.

“It’s cool, man,” one older Angel says. “We got brothers staying here. We came to party with ’em.”

Not 100 feet away, some 40 members of a rival club—the East L.A.–based Mongols—are gathered at Rosa’s Cantina, a bar set in a sea of nickel slots and blackjack tables. Sporting black and white lowrider patches on their jackets, the Mongols are armed with hammers, wrenches, and knives. They’ve been waiting. The Angels head straight for the fray.

“Who’s in charge here?” says one Mongol as the two groups square off. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“I am,” says an Angel, stepping forward.

There on the casino floor, surveillance cameras are rolling. Every move, every word is being captured on crude video. As the two leaders turn to walk away, the trash-talking starts among the others.

“What’s your problem?” says a Mongol.

“You’re my fuckin’ problem!” screams one Hells Angel.

At the front line one Angel rears back and delivers a kung fu kick to the chest of a Mongol. The two sides clash like vans full of men smacking into trees. Wrenches and knives arc through the air in a frenzy, splitting skin and cracking bone. Screeching waitresses dive for cover as blackjack tables are hurled over, raining cards and chips over terrified bystanders.

When the sharp snap, snap of gunfire blasts through the casino, every hair in the joint stands on end. In the middle of the melee, a dark-haired man in black leather is fiddling frantically with a pistol.

He is reloading. In a hurry.

Just minutes later, 10 ambulances and rows of cop cars arrived at Harrah’s to cart off the dead and mangled. The Mohave County SWAT team surrounded the place. All bridges and highways in and out of town were blocked off.

For all the Wild West’s glory, the incident at Laughlin was the deadliest gunfight in the history of Nevada casinos.

The Angels and their smaller rival, the Mongols, had a history of their own. The clash started two decades earlier over which club had the right to wear a California patch. But the battle at Harrah’s wasn’t just a continuation of their blood feud. It was the latest salvo in an unprecedented international turf war between the Hells Angels and virtually every other biker gang. Over the past few months, this war has become a distinctly American conflict, raging from coast to coast. At stake: a lot of pride, not to mention billions in low-end street crime—drugs, protection rackets, the stuff the Mob handled before it crumbled. And the bloodshed, investigators agree, is just beginning.

“In no time in history have you had all these groups squaring off against the Hells Angels,” says recently retired FBI biker gang investigator Tim McKinley, who tracked these clubs as an agent for two decades. “This is unprecedented. The Angels are going to have to respond accordingly if they wish to survive.”

Using interviews with members of different clubs, their lawyers, FBI and other officials, and bystanders who witnessed these killings, Maxim has dug deep into the well of madness behind the deadliest biker gang conflict ever.

THE ONE-PERCENTERS
The date was July 3, 1947. The six officers policing Hollister, California had completely lost control of their town. Thousands of drunks were drag racing their Indian Scouts and custom Harleys down San Benito Street, which was knee-deep in broken glass from shattered beer bottles. The local hospital’s ER was overflowing with accident victims.

In broad daylight Jim Cameron, a member of a club called the Boozefighters, rode his bike through the front door of Johnny’s pub, rolled up to the jam-packed bar, revved the engine, and demanded a beer. Outside, another Boozefighter—19-year-old Jim Morrison—was pissing into the radiator of a stranger’s car. Three others—Wino, Kokomo, and Fuzzy—were screeching through town in a Model T, rope towing an unconscious drunk they’d shoved into a wheelchair.

On this day the outlaw biker gang was born. By the time the riot was quelled, 50 Boozefighters were in jail. The story got so much attention, Hollywood made a movie about it starring Marlon Brando—The Wild One. The American Motorcycle Association made a statement claiming that 99 percent of bikers were law-abiding citizens. The other one percent were the outlaws, the “people your mother warned you about.”

Over the next few years, biker clubs full of disillusioned WWII vets began popping up all over the country, wearing One-Percenter patches in honor of the Boozefighters. Year by year the clubs grew, drawing attention to themselves with their willingness to shatter cheekbones over a pool game.

“Slowly, it turned from a bunch of people who liked to ride motorcycles into a moneymaking enterprise involving illegal activity, such as drugs and murder,” explains Patrick Schneider, an Arizona-based federal prosecutor and president of the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators’ Association. By the ’60s the major clubs had marked their territory: the Outlaws in the Midwest; the Bandidos in the Southwest; the Pagans on the East Coast; the Mongols in Southern California; and the biggest club, the Hells Angels, in the Northwest and parts of the South.

The boundaries remained well delineated. Then something happened that changed everything.

CLASH OF THE TITANS
In the early ’90s, the second biggest club, the Bandidos, started expanding. They convinced a group called the Rock Machine—a bunch of leather thugs in Montreal—to join their ranks. But Montreal was Hells Angels territory. Tensions started to run high.

Canada held an undeniable lure: the Angels’ $5 million-a-day cocaine operation. In the summer of ’94, a guerrilla war erupted on the streets of Montreal, combat unlike anything a North American city had ever seen.

In August 1995, an 11-year-old boy named Daniel Desrochers was playing on the sidewalk. A drug dealer, Marc Dube, 26, walked up and jumped in a nearby Jeep. When Dube turned the key, a bomb ripped the car to shreds Jerusalem-style, killing him instantly. The little boy died four days later of shrapnel wounds. Dube, police learned, was a pawn between the Angels and the Bandidos.

A string of payback hits followed, a bloody chess game unfolding in the streets.

In 2000 two suspected loan sharks connected to the Angels—Robert Savard, 48, and Normand Descoteaux, 52—were eating breakfast at a joint called Eggstra when two masked men walked in and started shooting. Savard died in his seat. As diners dived for cover, the shooters pumped a bullet into Descoteaux’s head and another four into a waitress.

Miraculously, both survived. But dozens of others didn’t. Slowly, the death toll rose into the triple digits.

In 2001 the police mobilized Operation Springtime. Among the 100 bikers arrested, they hauled in the Hells Angels’ leader, Maurice “Mom” Boucher, suspected of over a dozen killings. The kingpin was sentenced to life this past May. By that time 170 people had been murdered.

Meanwhile, violence erupted across Scandinavia, where the Angels, Bandidos, and Outlaws were opening chapters, competing for port city drug turf. The clash was brutal—bikers fighting in the streets with AK-47s. The violence drew international attention after a Bandido blew up the Angels’ Copenhagen clubhouse using an antitank rocket launcher. Two men died; another 19 suffered serious injury.

“After that the world turned upside down,” says federal prosecutor Schneider. “Expansion began among all the gangs.”

With the law cracking down in Canada and Europe, the clubs set their sights on the States. They infiltrated markets, snatched up turf. Since ’97 the Angels’ membership has risen from 800 to 2,100 and the Bandidos from 700 to 2,000.

And they armed themselves. “They have dynamite, C4, plastic explosives, radio-detonated bombs,” notes ex-FBI biker investigator McKinley, who says undercover Feds purchased these weapons from biker gangs on several occasions.

The stage was set for all-out war.

PAGANS IN HELL
Along the bar at Diamonds pub in Lindenhurst, New York, they gathered by the dozens—barrel-chested bikers whispering furtively. They’d been filing in since 9 a.m., filling the gravel parking lot with vans and cars with license plates from as far off as New Hampshire and Ohio. They’d called ahead to reserve tables. By that afternoon, February 23, 2002, the Long Island waterfront bar was overflowing with One-percenters, over 70 guys with fiery patches on their denim vests—the colors of the Pagans.

In the middle of the bar, Dennis “Rooster” Katona held court. The 36-year-old sergeant at arms out of Pittsburgh passed around a map of a catering hall called the Vanderbilt down the road, where the Hells Angels were holding their annual Hellraiser Ball, a two-day motorcycle-tattoo expo. The map had the Vanderbilt’s exits marked on it. Two guys named Mangy and Rhino were partying there—former Pagans who’d jumped ship to the Angels without returning their colors.

“Find ’em,” Katona said. “And take their jackets…by force if you have to.”

The Pagans nodded and shook each other’s hands. Anticipating the worst, two had recently completed their wills. Others were wearing bulletproof vests. When Katona gave the word at roughly 3 p.m., they filed out into 10 vans, armed with baseball bats, ax handles, and knives. They had a bone to pick.

Until 1999, Long Island was Pagan territory. That year the cops busted 30 of them for weapons possession and conspiracy—small-time crime that added up. (“Among other things, they were extorting $20 per shift per stripper from topless dance clubs,” says a Nassau County police official.) The arrests left a power vacuum in Long Island, and the Angels took over. More than 25 Pagans had since traded in their colors for the Angels’ skull and wings. For Katona and the others, it was pure humiliation.

When the vans arrived at the Vanderbilt—a suburban, white-columned hall usually reserved for weddings and bar mitzvahs—the Hellraiser Ball was hopping. The 12,000-square-foot marble floor was packed with nearly 1,000 bikers and tattoo artists, boozing at the bar or mingling at the T-shirt booths. Upstairs the blues band Little Wolf was jamming, while celebrity Angels like Chuck Zito of Oz signed autographs. There by Zito’s side, the Angels’ founding member and international leader, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, was signing copies of his new book, Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free.

Out front the Pagans unloaded quickly. The first group, led by Katona, charged through the white doors into the catering hall, where Angels were selling merchandise and handing out wristbands for the $25 cover. As soon as they stepped inside, the Pagans attacked—swinging clubs at anything moving.

In a split second, the party turned into a combat zone.

Eight-foot-long exhibition tables were hurled aside. Screeching mothers tossed their kids out of harm’s way. Angels sprinted for the action from all directions, armed with anything they could get their hands on. Guns. Knives. Bare fists. One Pagan landed an ax handle on the side of an Angels’ face so hard it made a popping noise. The Angel staggered, blood pouring out of his eye.

In the middle of the melee, a gunman drew a pistol. He held it firmly and fired five shots directly into the crowd.

In the pandemonium, Robert Rutherford, a 52-year-old Pagan postal worker, felt a numbness enveloping his body. White dots obscured his vision. He collapsed. Fellow club members dragged him out into the parking lot. As they desperately shoveled him in the back of a crowded van, bikers swarmed around, sprinting in all directions to avoid the cops.

In the van Coney Island Joe DeMatteo, a Pagan and a Nam vet with a Purple Heart, felt Rutherford’s chest. There was no pulse. DeMatteo started pumping his rib cage.

“Go! Go!” he yelled, the blood covering his hands and face.

ALL-OUT WAR
As the Pagans fled, 100 police cruisers and two helicopters swarmed the scene. When they stopped and searched all 10 vans as well as the Vanderbilt, they found nearly 500 weapons, including a loaded Uzi, handguns and knives, a lipstick container with a hidden blade, plus “a large amount of cocaine.”

Eleven rioters were taken to local hospitals—five with gunshot wounds and six with stab wounds. The cops hauled in 73 Pagans for weapons charges and gang assault, plus one Hells Angel—Raymond Dwyer, the alleged gunman, a 38-year-old local tattoo artist charged with second-degree murder. Rutherford, a Pennsylvania Pagan, died from a bullet and a knife wound to the chest.

The battle for the Northeast had begun.

The war immediately spread to the City of Brotherly Love—Philly, Pagan turf. At 10:30 p.m. on March 5, 2002, a car rolled up outside Coney Island Joe’s Tattoo Studio. The shop belonged to DeMatteo, the Pagan who’d battled the Angels in Long Island. A man stepped out of the car and hurled two firebombs through the window. They landed in the bathroom; flames shot through the windows and licked the walls, but no one was injured. Yet.

On the night of May 5, John Giorno, a 63-year-old Pagan-turned-Hells Angel, was walking with his wife in a Philly parking lot when three burly guys jumped him. As his wife watched, they beat him with ax handles, stabbed him three times, and left him leaking like a strainer onto the pavement.

The local police did what they could. “The view in this unit is as long as the Hells Angels keep pressing forward to get a foothold in Philadelphia, we’re sitting on a time bomb,” said Lieutenant Tom Coccia of the city’s Organized Crime Unit.

Meanwhile up north, the mercury was rising. A few days after the Long Island riot, 23 heavily armed Outlaws were busted casing the Hells Angels clubhouse in Revere, Mass.

As news of the escalating war on the East Coast spread, clubs on the West Coast started to see a weakness. Had the Angels left their flank unprotected? An old bitter rival, the Chicano-based Mongols out of East L.A., began organizing to go on the offensive—just in time for spring, when representatives of the different outlaw clubs make their pilgrimages to the dozen international biker rallies throughout the U.S.

Barrels of booze. Thousands of bikers. Enough hatred to fill the Grand Canyon. It was a grim recipe for disaster.

INTO THE DESERT
Laughlin, Nevada. The evening of April 26, 2002. Some 80,000 bikers—10 times the desert town’s population—had taken the place by storm. The Doobie Brothers were jamming at the Flamingo. Custom hogs screeched down Casino Drive. It was a weekend warrior’s wet dream.

Before the rally started, rumors had spread about a potential clash between the Mongols and the Angels. Both clubs had their paws deep in the Southern California drug trade. But their avarice wasn’t solely profit motivated. “It’s about being top of the heap, king of the mountain,” said Bill Queen, an undercover ATF agent, after he set up a sting that snagged 29 Mongols in 2000 for drug dealing and murder.

By the first night of the River Run, both clubs had arrived in force, each claiming its turf—the Mongols at Harrah’s on the strip and the Angels at Gretchen’s Inn. Scores of tattooed outlaws were everywhere, as were the cops and ATF agents, slapped with the task of keeping the peace.

Round one: According to one report, a group of Mongols surrounded a Hells Angels T-shirt booth at some point. They ordered an Angel to remove his patch—fightin’ words.

Round two: At sunset a group of Angels exiting the Golden Nugget on the strip bumped into some Mongols. A scuffle broke out. According to a hotel security official, “someone got popped in the head with a flashlight” before it was broken up.

Round three: Later in the night, a bunch of Mongols allegedly surrounded a small group of Hells Angels who were gambling at Harrah’s and ordered them to leave—more fightin’ words. The Angels called for backup. Within minutes biker thugs all over town were gathering. Armed with bats, knives, wrenches, and guns, they mounted their steel horses and cruised down Casino Drive, heading straight for Harrah’s.

KILLING TIME
At Rosa’s Cantina, the Mongols huddled and made a battle plan. They knew what was coming.

According to interviews with bystanders in the casino that night, the Mongols began patrolling the floor. They stationed themselves by entrances and at different intervals throughout the casino. Waiting on line at the cashier’s window with a bucket of nickels, David Jackson, a partyer from Vegas in for the rally, nudged his girlfriend, Denise Massey. “That’s scary,” he said, nodding toward a biker carrying a three-foot metal flashlight. “That could be used as a weapon.”

Another gambler from Reno, Nick Ramsey [name has been changed], hit the bathroom just before 2 a.m. Two thugs were standing outside the door, looking nervous and hostile. “Inside, the room was packed with Mongols,” Ramsey says. “For every patch holder at the urinals or in the stalls, there was another with his back to the guy and his arms folded, watching the door. I knew something was about to go down.”

Meanwhile undercover cops cased the casino. There was enough paranoia in the joint to overflow a psycho ward.

At 2:15 a.m., the roar of engines out front signaled the arrival of Angels. They entered the casino, made straight for Rosa’s. One Mongol stepped forward to meet them.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked.

A precarious moment passed. Then a Hells Angel delivered the first blow—a kick to the chest. In the pit adrenaline-pumped bikers on each side attacked the enemy closest to them in a frenzy. “All of the sudden there were bikers everywhere, coming out of the woodwork swinging,” one bystander remembers. The epicenter of the rumble—70 men strong—grew exponentially as the primal fight-or-flight instinct drew more men into the battle. One Hells Angel grabbed an older member, shoved him behind a slot machine, and stuck a chair in front to protect him. Then he jumped in. Another Angel hid behind a slot machine. A Mongol ran up, hunting desperately for someone to hit or a quick exit. The Angel jumped out and bludgeoned the Mongol with a wrench.

In the middle of the melee, one dark-haired biker was slammed against a wall. As he came up, he pulled out a semiautomatic, took aim, and fired point blank into the other biker’s belly. The big man doubled over and staggered away.

More gunshots followed as hundreds of patrons dived for cover, screaming. One Angel took a bullet in his back and fell over a blackjack table, which came crashing to the floor Hollywood-style. Another bullet pierced a bystander’s ass.

Ramsey was taking cover behind a pillar when he saw a beefy Angel, stripped from the waist up, lying on his back. Blood was spilling from a gunshot wound in his skull. Another Angel with a bloody face was pumping the fallen man’s chest, giving him mouth-to-mouth.

Then, 10 feet away, Ramsey saw the shooter. “He was reloading his gun. He didn’t have any colors; he had on black leather. His head was on a swivel, looking to see if anyone was watching him as he loaded as fast as he could.”

With guns drawn, dozens of lawmen raided the casino, squirting pepper spray. A stampede for the doors followed. One Vegas cop, Sergeant Gary Hood, 54, found himself in between three bikers and a door. Hood tried to stop them as they fled. One of them—a Hells Angel—lifted a handgun in Hood’s direction, and the cop fired a .45 round. He missed. When the smoke cleared, the hallway was empty.

TOTAL LOCKDOWN
Ninety seconds after the first blow, the riot was over. Security locked down the elevators and doors. Bullet shells and cards littered the floor. Victims lay everywhere, some groaning in pain, others perfectly still. Panicked police were pinning cuffed outlaws to the ground.

As crowds gathered outside, EMTs carted the bodies into ambulances parked out front. They found three dead bikers, their blood staining the casino floor: Angels Robert Tumelty, 50, and Jeramie Bell, 27, of gunshot wounds; and Mongol Anthony Barrera, 43, of a knife wound to the heart. Paramedics carried 16 others off on gurneys—nine with stab or gunshot wounds and one with a fractured skull.

The police detained over 100 bikers. They charged just one with murder—Calvin Schaefer, 32, an Angel from Chandler, Arizona, who police say was captured on surveillance video shooting bikers. “It was legitimate self-defense,” says his Vegas-based lawyer David Chesnoff. “Just because you’re a Hells Angel doesn’t mean you can’t defend yourself.”

Meanwhile, California Highway Patrol discovered another Hells Angel fatality. Christian Tate, 28, had left Laughlin three hours earlier, headed home alone on Highway 40 to see his family in San Diego. Cops found him lying in a ditch on the side of the road, shot in the back at point-blank range. His license was lying on the seat of his Harley. The killer has yet to be found.

THE CHIEF
It’s a broiling Saturday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and 200,000 bikers have swamped this coast town for the Myrtle Beach Bike Week. A month has passed since Laughlin, and the Hells Angels have taken over the Holiday Inn on the beach. The streets are crawling with outlaws—and enough undercover heat to burn ’em all should hell break lose.

At a Qwik Mart down the road, 63-year-old Ralph “Sonny” Barger—the international leader of the Hells Angels—is sitting behind a table signing copies of his new book. It’s whispered that Barger is marked for assassination. His presence is a taunt to his enemies: Here I am, you pussies. Take your best shot. Then again, Angels are surrounding him, wearing their game faces. One is wearing a FILTHY666FEW patch, meaning he’s killed for the club. If anyone so much as farts in Sonny’s direction, he’ll be cut down.

“We started out in the ’50s having fun, riding motorcycles,” Barger says. “In the ’60s we were beating people up and taking drugs. And in the ’70s and ’80s we got into crime and going to prison.” He has a quarter-size hole in his throat covered with a white patch that he breathes through, the result of a long cigarette habit. When he speaks, he puts his thumb over the patch to direct air to his mouth. “The ’90s came, and we straightened up our lives. Now it’s about riding motorcycles and having fun again. It bothers some of the other clubs.” He pauses. “You see what they’re trying to do to us.”

When asked about the biker wars, Barger answers calmly.

“There are certain things we’re not going to talk about.”

And that’s it. But outside in the parking lot, one younger, dark-haired Angel has this to say about Laughlin: “We don’t look for trouble, but we don’t duck it.” He spits on the pavement. “There are some things worth fighting for.”

Like revenge for the murder of Tate, the Angel found dead on Highway 40 outside of Laughlin?

“We didn’t hear about that until the morning after the riot. The Mongols were looking for trouble at Laughlin. But that guy on the highway was different. Most are saying it was a Pagan hit, revenge for the Pagan killed in Long Island. That’s their style, the fucking cowards.”

Just then, three other Angels approach, eyeing the younger one with a gaze that could cut glass.

“Go stand over there,” one says, pointing to the other end of the parking lot. The point is clear. In a deadly guerrilla war that’s being fought right under the hairy nose of the American justice system, anything you say can be used against you. By anyone. Knowing he’s probably just earned a beating for talking to a reporter, the younger Angel shuffles away.

The Killing Floor

A gruesome blow-by-blow of the April 27 gunfight at Harrah’s Casino in Laughlin.

1. 2:15 a.m.: Forty Hells Angels arrive at Harrah’s. They leave bikes near the door for a quick getaway.

2. Rosa’s Cantina, where 40 Mongols are platooned, preparing for battle

3. Location of first blow

4. Hells Angel Calvin Schaefer, 32, an alleged gunman, pulls out his weapon.

5. Bystander, shot in the ass

6. A Hells Angel is shot in the back. He falls over a blackjack table.

7. Hells Angel Robert Tumelty, 50, dies of a gunshot wound.

8. Hells Angel Jeramie Bell, 27, is killed by gunfire.

9. Mongol Anthony Barrera, 43, dies after getting stabbed in the heart.

 

[3phemeral]

Yea -- this happened a while ago. There used to be a biker gang up the street from my house that would always ride their bikes at all hours of the night, loud as heck, disturbing the neighborhood. One day, I tried getting home, but the street was blocked and I had to take an alternate route to my house. When I got home, my mom told me that the biker gang on our street was the same they mentioned in the news paper, the Mongols. Not sure exaclty how far or how many houses the gang had, but the cops stayed here for a good week before clearing out the area. Other than the annoying bike riding, though, there was really nothing interesting about them. The guy who lived there looked like Charles Manson, and I always made an effort to avoid eye contact at all costs.