Word: helling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Today's Hell's Angels number more than 500 members in 32 chapters, and, according to the O.S.I.T., they control 75% of California's methamphetamine market. They have built up a highly sophisticated crime network, amassing tax shelters, high-priced lawyers and an arsenal of antitank rockets, Claymore mines and M-60 machine guns...
...special report to be released this week by the California attorney general's office details the growth of clandestine labs. Though the report does not specifically link Hell's Angels to methamphetamine stashes, FBI officials suspect the club is behind the bulk of them. "They have their own operation and distribution network," says Floyd Clarke, deputy assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division. "The entire organization is involved in the operation...
...protected federal witness living under a new identity, the Angels cornered the methamphetamine market by cornering the chemists. In taped interviews with the O.S.I.T., made available to TIME, Eaton stated, "They find someone already making speed and say, 'O.K., now you make it for us.' " Typically, a Hell's Angel would pay a drug maker $25,000 for five pounds and advance him another $25,000 for the next five. "Now the guy owes the club," Eaton explained. The profits are handled illicitly. Said Eaton: "You try to sidestep the IRS, you get yourself money managers. Money...
...Mongol bikers on a San Diego freeway and machine-gunned them down. At the slain Mongols' funeral, a bouquet of red-and-white carnations (the Angel colors) and a dynamite-loaded Rambler were dropped off. The car exploded, injuring three mourners. The Mongols retaliated by gunning down Hell's Angel "Godfather" Raymond Piltz in 1982 at a biker bar in Lemon Grove, Calif...
Sonny Barger, 45, the famed former national president of the Hell's Angels, dismisses the FBI's charge that his club has become a wheeling and dealing version of the Mafia. "The Government is waging a smear campaign against us," says the biker turned bourgeois. "It is a Hollywood image and a Government image, but it is not the truth." Barger insists the gang cannot control what each member does. "A lot of Hell's Angels have gone to prison for individual things," he says, "just like policemen...