Charlie and the Angels: The Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the Sixty Years War

by Alex Caine, Random House Canada, 2012, pp. 272.
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(BAnQ)
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Résumé et critique de  Damian J. Penny dans le Canadian Lawyer.
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A rare look inside the outlaw biker culture

Pop quiz: name the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle gang.

I suspect most of you answered “Hells Angels,” the notorious California-based organization that more or less invented outlaw biker culture as we know it. But you would be wrong.

The Outlaws, founded in Illinois in the early 1950s, actually has more members around the world than their better-known rivals. But they’ve made a point of maintaining a lower profile than the Angels — to the extent tough-looking guys on Harley-Davidson bikes, wearing a skull-and-crossbones named “Charlie” on their backs, can keep any kind of lower profile — and maybe that’s part of the reason they’ve become so big.

That, and the fact they’ve proven they aren’t afraid to take on the Hells Angels, or other outlaw biker gangs, on their own turf. For decades, the Angels and the Outlaws have been locked in a brutal, worldwide battle for territory — win a city, state, or country and the gang controls the drug trade, prostitution, and other organized criminal activities.

The bloody rivalry is described, in riveting detail, in Charlie and the Angels: The Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the Sixty Years War by Alex Caine. Caine hasn’t just studied the one-percenter lifestyle — he claims to have lived it, as an undercover operative for police forces in Canada and around the world (“Alex Caine,” needless to say, is a pseudonym).
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