Author: Thomas Barker
ISBN No: 9781 59345 4067
Review date: 28/04/2024
No of pages: 190
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781593454067/
Year of publication: 24/02/2015
Brief:
Biker Gangs and Organized Crime, by Thomas Barker, second edition, published 2014 by Routledge. Paperback, 190 pages
As the full title of Biker Gangs suggests, biker gangs, also known as one-per cent biker gangs, are becoming transnational and are doing violent, organised crime. The US author sets out how motorcycle clubs are not the same as biker gangs; and rival British gangs, for instance, may fight, not least with North American gangs such as Hells Angels that have overseas puppets or supporters. British readers may want to turn straight to the ten-page chapter about ‘back patch clubs’ in the UK. Barker traces the history of such groups dating from about the 1960s; and ends by detailing a murder at the Bulldog Bash motorcycle rally in 2007, and a fight at Birmingham Airport in 2008 after rival gang members happened to be on the same return flight from Spain. He concludes: “The potential for biker gang violence still exists in the UK as indigenous and US-based clubs jockey for territory and drug markets. Complicating this arrangement are the expansion plans for the Hells Angels and the Bandidos.”
Sydney Airport, too, saw a similar fight in 2009. In Australia such bikers are known as ‘bikies’. Barker does a thorough job of describing gangs across North America, Australasia, and Europe.
Barker takes on what he terms the number one controversy in any discussion of outlaw motorcycle clubs. Are they social groups whose members love motorcycles, and it so happens that some are criminals; or are they set up to do organised crime? Barker answers in terms of a ‘continuum’, ‘with motorcycle clubs on one end and criminal gangs on the other’. In more detail, Barker suggests that there’s a difference between outlaw motorcycle (OMG) gang members doing criminal things (such as take drugs and fighting in bars) and being involved in organised crime. As Barker points out, gangs are a violent world, whether doing drug trafficking, or protecting the gang against insults or what are taken as acts of disrespect. “To deny that OMGs are gangs and claim that they are really motorcycle clubs of men united by their love of biking and brotherhood is turning a blind eye to the extreme violence, murder, drug and weapons trafficking, and other organised crime activities committed by OMGs.”
As Barker says, it’s dangerous to associate with such gangs – whether as an undercover informant or a researcher – who have excluded themselves from society. Hence we don’t know that much – for example, gang numbers. In the US, membership is into the thousands, Barker suggests. He ends with a US case of an undercover agent who sued his employer for not protecting him and his family. While Barker writes strictly objectively, and has little to say (whether by choice or lack of material) about whether biker gangs are spreading, geographically or in the sort of criminality they do, readers can draw their own conclusions from the carefully-gathered material, mainly from court cases and published biographies of bikers. For instance, biker gangs have been going in the United States since at least the late 1940s, after the Second World War, if not earlier.
Barker takes up two related general topics of interest – whether society responds to such gangs with a moral panic (in other words, blows the threat out of proportion) and how that same society publicises and even hails Hells Angels, for instance, in films and other popular culture. As for whether or how private security readers ought to be aware of such gangs, Barker quotes a US list of crimes by four outlaw motorcycle gangs, which includes thefts of motorcycles and parts, arson, insurance fraud, counterfeiting and money laundering.
Biker Gangs and Transnational Organized Crime, by Thomas Barker, second edition, published 2014 by Routledge. Paperback, 190 pages, ISBN 9781 59345 4067.
